Sitecore.Context.User.IsAuthenticated returns true for extranet\Anonymous user - sitecore

Question

I have Sitecore 6.6 installed. I wanted to add a new domain to Sitecore; Since my Sitecore instance is deployed in two servers with two Sitecore sites in each pointing to different web databases but same core, master and analytics databases, I couldn't do it using Sitecore Domain manager.So I thought of doing it manually by editting the App_Config\Security\domains.config in the server. The following was the domains.config that I had.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<domains xmlns:sc="Sitecore">
<domain name="sitecore" ensureAnonymousUser="false" />
<domain name="extranet" defaultProfileItemId="{AE4C4969-5B7E-4B4E-9042-B2D8701CE214}" />
<domain name="default" isDefault="true" />
<sc:templates>
<domain type="Sitecore.Security.Domains.Domain, Sitecore.Kernel">
<ensureAnonymousUser>true</ensureAnonymousUser>
<locallyManaged>false</locallyManaged>
</domain>
</sc:templates>
<domain name="Station" defaultProfileItemId="{F181ED3D-F342-46E6-B6F6-2A6A6173B513}" />
<domain name="Emailcampaign" />
</domains>
I added one more domain(MyDomain) at the end like below.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<domains xmlns:sc="Sitecore">
<domain name="sitecore" ensureAnonymousUser="false" />
<domain name="extranet" defaultProfileItemId="{AE4C4969-5B7E-4B4E-9042-B2D8701CE214}" />
<domain name="default" isDefault="true" />
<sc:templates>
<domain type="Sitecore.Security.Domains.Domain, Sitecore.Kernel">
<ensureAnonymousUser>true</ensureAnonymousUser>
<locallyManaged>false</locallyManaged>
</domain>
</sc:templates>
<domain name="Station" defaultProfileItemId="{F181ED3D-F342-46E6-B6F6-2A6A6173B513}" />
<domain name="Emailcampaign" />
<domain name="MyDomain" />
</domains>
As soon as I did that, Sitecore.Context.User.IsAuthenticated started returning true for extranet\Anonymous user(Non-logged in user) in the code.
Has anyone faced this issue before?
Please let me know where am I going wrong.

Answer 1

I also encounted this issue back when I was working with Sitecore 6.6, I'm not certain if its an issue in later versions. Essentially when you modified your domains.config with the param ensureAnonymousUser set to true the Anonymous User for that domain, in this case Extranet, was created in the database - it may not have been until you changed that setting.
In Sitecore all non-logged in users view the site as the user *domain*/anonymous. As Sitecore's membership is based on .NET Membership it determines that the User is logged in as its using that account.
Therefore I recommend completing an additional check with your Sitecore.Context.User.IsAuthenticated to check if the username of User's account is *domain of site*/anonymous, Sitecore.Context.User.Name, if it is return false.
EDIT
I have confirmed Sitecore.Context.User.IsAuthenticated returning true for *domain*\Anonymous user has been fixed in Sitecore 8. Therefore you can use it to determine if the User is logged in and not using the *domain*\anonymous account.

Answer 2

We finally resolved this issue! This was caused by a fix we added to solve an issue we had with Sitecore ECM. The issue was that Sitecore used to log out as soon as we clicked on the message preview. So we followed the steps given in the below thread to fix the issue.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/30836600/4165670
But we were not testing for Anonymous user like it is done in the thread. We never pushed this code into Content Delivery site and when
we created the new domain, This code got pushed into the Content Delivery site with some other code.
Since we are setting the current user as the Active user in the code, it started showing that extranet\Anonymous user as the current user.