The issue here is that a single federation of conferences may be hosted from different domains, where one needs to log in for each domain (single sign in would be nice, but that’s another issue).
The issue occurs when a person:

1. is logged in on the domain the root conference (e.g. http://conf.researchr.org/home/pldi-ecoop-2017), optionally starring some of the events
2. then, visits a sub-conference page which is hosted from another domain, e.g. http://2017.ecoop.org/track/ecoop-2017-papers#program and he/she stars some event.
3. then, refreshes the program page of the root conference, where he/she doesn’t get to see the starred events from step 2.

The system currently only gathers/merges the personal programs upon log in and accesses them using the user session object. Currently it only merges new personal programs into the user session of domain of the viewed URL.
Fix: Upon log-in, it should also add personal programs to the user session objects of the same user from different domains.

Submitted by Elmer van Chastelet on 15 June 2017 at 10:48

should starred events not be associated with the user account instead of with a particular session?

The starred events are retrieved from the user account when logged in, but accessed using session data, as personal programs also work without a User account.