I still don't understand why refresh tokens expire.

On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 6:58 PM Neil Madden <[email protected]> wrote:

> Ok, the same point still stands though.
>
> Also, it occurs to me that the AS could indicate “your grant is about to
> expire” by simply not returning a refresh token on the last refresh flow
> (after all, why issue one if you know the grant will expire before it will
> be used?).
>
> (But then again I’m also not really clear why you’d issue a RT to a
> confidential client that expires before grant does).
>
> But these issues can wait until after adoption.
>
> — Neil
>
> On 14 Nov 2025, at 17:28, Aaron Parecki <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 
> In that example, Zapier *is* the client that needs the information from
> the AS in order to proactively notify the user.
>
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 9:24 AM Neil Madden <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Ok, that makes sense, and I’m not against adding this if it’s useful. It
>> seems to me generally better if the AS (Zapier in this case) just took care
>> of this rather than every client having to implement it, but it’s a fairly
>> lightweight addition to the spec.
>>
>> — Neil
>>
>> On 14 Nov 2025, at 17:05, Max Gerber <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> > So the user uses the app often enough that this prompting can happen at
>> some point near to expiry, but not often enough to notice a gap in service?
>>
>> The point is for the user to be prompted before expiry, so no gap in
>> service occurs. There are plenty of "set-and-forget" OAuth connections -
>> anything that involves syncing data from one place to another comes to
>> mind. I have some Zapier integrations with various systems that I use
>> daily, but I barely touch the zapier dashboard anymore now that the initial
>> connection is set up. Sure, Zapier could notify me after the connection
>> breaks, but that would be pretty disruptive. I'd need to figure out how to
>> sync all the missed events across different systems, and my coworkers that
>> depend on the integration working would be left in the dark until I come
>> back to fix it. For personal usecases, a small gap in service might be
>> fine. For enterprise usecases, it's a much bigger deal.
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 8:29 AM Neil Madden <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 14 Nov 2025, at 16:08, Aaron Parecki <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> 
>>> This has already been discussed and presented in the several past IETF
>>> meetings about this draft.
>>>
>>>
>>> It sounds like something should maybe be added to the document then if
>>> it keeps coming up?
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, it means the client can prompt the user in the UI to tell them they
>>> will need to re-authorize and re-approve access. This lets the client
>>> proactively tell the user they need to re-authorize before the access is
>>> lost. Without this, the client will lose access for an indeterminate amount
>>> of time until the user realizes the client has stopped working and goes and
>>> reconnects it.
>>>
>>>
>>> So the user uses the app often enough that this prompting can happen at
>>> some point near to expiry, but not often enough to notice a gap in service?
>>> And the app has no backchannel notification mechanism (eg email) to inform
>>> the user that access has expired?
>>>
>>> — Neil
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 7:51 AM Neil Madden <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> > On 14 Nov 2025, at 15:14, Max Gerber <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> > 
>>>> > > […] The client can also schedule a notification to the user to
>>>> renew the grant in 11 months.
>>>>
>>>> But what does this mean in practice? Asking them to re-login and
>>>> re-approve the scopes? If so, why not just wait for the grant to expire and
>>>> do that anyway? What is the concrete benefit to user or developer
>>>> experience of this field?
>>>>
>>>> — Neil
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