@BlacKnight
eta: I went back to the home page immediately after posting that, and it shows me as logged in โ it's got the "BlacKnight [1/16]" link on the left โ but there's no "My Stream" link.
Since the DDOS attacks (which seem to be gone for now) the home page's code didn't change.
Your quoted text above is the most peculiar to me, because to show the 'my stream' link, the code checks for the existence of an email address in the session data, which is linked to the nickname. So if your nickname exists for display, your email address must exist and the 'my stream' should be displayed.
If the above is happening, it could only mean that there is a bug in the underlying PHP interpreter somewhere outside of my own code. My code couldn't be simpler or done in any different way to display that link.
And to be clear, since this thread started, I've tested the home page with various browsers literally hundreds of times, with safari, chrome, Firefox, desktop versions and tablet versions and I've never had the 'my stream' link not show up when it should. So I can't replicate the issue so far, not on the site itself nor on the test server that I use for development.