Forum auto logout

[IFadeToGrey]

Hello Ladyada and all,

I just wanted to ask if you could remove the "feature" on the forums that automatically logs you out after a certain period of time. I've had at least a couple of lengthier explanations/responses that vanished into the ether after I hit "Submit" because it timed me out. (I first chalked it up to it just being the Internet god's way of telling me I was being an overly verbose, or whatever, but after it happened a second time... argh...

[len17]

I always edit long messages in a text editor and paste them into the browser when I'm done. All forums have the same auto-logout issue, not to mention random internet gremlins messing things up occasionally.

[IFadeToGrey]

Indeed Len, all forums have a timeout, but it's really set rather short. The default session length for phpBB is 3600 seconds (one hour). It's like just a few minutes on here.

[adafruit]

we always are kept logged in for weeks at a time so not sure what this is about, what message do you get?

[IFadeToGrey]

Hmmm... that makes me think that it may be a Safari issue. I did a little looking and found this link:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=2099028

To answer your question, it just tells me that I need to be logged in to reply to this forum and asks for my username and password. (This occurs after I press Submit.)

[len17]

Hmmm... that makes me think that it may be a Safari issue.

Let's see what happens with Firefox.

Edit: It seems to have worked. I waited 1/2 hour before submitting the message.

[len17]

Just did another test:

If I type a message and wait 1 hour before submitting, it sends me to a login screen instead of submitting the message. (Doesn't happen if I only wait 1/2 hour.)

Also, if I'm just viewing the forum and let it sit idle for 1 hour, it logs me out. (It doesn't do this if I check the option to "Log me in automatically each visit" on the login screen.)

I'm using Firefox 4 on Windows XP.

[IFadeToGrey]

Len17, thanks for running your Firefox tests. Now I'm really curious about this, and so here's what I've found... It'll just stay logged in if I'm not in the middle of writing a forum post. It'll time me out in just a few minutes however if I am.

Unfortunately, (and frustratingly) there's no indication of this until I hit submit. I'm pretty sure that it's under 10 minutes though. This leads me to believe that it may in fact be the Safari cookie issues I linked to earlier.

Of course this is hardly a big issue in the grand scheme of the universe, and there are the obvious work-arounds... but is exactly the sort of tangent that causes me to spin off into some path to oblivion only to be distracted from what I should really be doing... only so I can know the reason why... lol.