One benefit they bring up is the site switcher, which is much nicer than the old drop down they had. I have a question for people who participate on multiple sites: do you need a separate account on each site? All I can recall is that it was indeed the case in the past, but there was mumblings about them making the system better for multiple site accounts. After a quick search, questions like this [0] make me think it still isn't the case that there is a universal account.

The real reason I ask is because I was bummed when they removed the ability to filter by top questions per week or per month [1]. The justification given in the response is fair enough, but I have never understood why, as a comment there points out, they also removed the ability to manually filter by ?tab=(active|hot|week|month). The cynic in my thinks this was mainly to drive people to signup for the weekly emails. The problem I have with that is I just want to hit some sites once a month and see the top questions, some once a week, etc. For example, I have no need to read the physics or mathematics communities very often, but would love to read the top questions once a month.

So, it seems like the option is still there when you are signed in, but I have never wanted to sign up an account for each site. Is my understanding of their accounts system wrong?

[0] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/195849/how-can-i-ful...

[1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/180850/hot-and-week-...