Educate me...

So I know it’s got to be an easy answer, sometimes they are the hardest ones to come up with though. How come when I’m already “signed in”, and go to see if there is any “chat” going on etc. it asks me to “sign in” again. When I attempt to, it won’t recognize my user name or password…even though I just used it to get here in the first place??

Separate program that does not use the forum database.