Automatically logged out and lost a well elaborated message

A

Anonymous

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Does this happen only to me?

At times, I am elaborating a message which takes its time. The server logs me out, because the session has expired, I login again and instead of carrying me to my message, I see:

Your submission could not be processed because you have logged in since the previous ...

From here, there is no recover, the message is simply lost, 30 minutes of work for nothing x(

I could have copied the text before submission, but at times I forget this.
 
You can use the "back" functions of your browser and copy the message then, go forward again and paste it. This worked for me once, but usually I write long messages off-line and only do shorter things (like this) in the forums own editor.
 
Maybe one solution would be increase the "Session Timeout" option or disable the automatic Logout, but the latter it's not recommended, only the admins could do something about it. I think it's set to 900 seconds by default. In the meanwhile, @Crivens has given us a good trick and it works ;)

PS. I tried it using Chromium. So maybe it depend on the browser.
 
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@Crivens and @cpu82,

many thanks for your replies.

I am using exclusively the latest Safari on Mac OS X as the browser for editing forum posts.

This was not the first time it happened to me, and I tried the back button, but the forum got me into an infinite loop showing this very message:

Your submission could not be processed because you have logged in since the previous ...

again and again. I tried also all pages in the history, and my edit was nowhere. Because I know this may happen, I usually copy the whole post into the clipboard before I press the submit button, but yesterday I forgot this, and I lost my work once again.

Editing in a separate editor is not really a solution for me, because I use quite often the <Preview Post> button, in order to check that the text is formatted how I want to be, sorry personal style.

I still think, that it is a flaw of the system to log-out the people without giving them a chance to save the work.

I didn't find an option to increase the time-out from 900 s to let's say 1800 s.

Other users seem to have lost messages also, but it seems because of a different problem, however, I cannot tell if this was related or not.

Best regards

Rolf
 
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rolfheinrich said:
Other users seem to have lost messages also, but it seems because of different problem, however, I cannot tell if this was related or not.

No, that was because Firefox suffers from Windows disease: twelve different ways to do the same thing, most of them shortcuts to Google because apparently it is too difficult to find. That problem was solved by removing all those worse-than-useless keyboard and mouse shortcuts.
 
I hardly write anything offline and so far I never fell into this trap. However, I always make sure to copy / paste my longer scribbles into an editor (notepad or metapad) to make sure that I won't lose anything.

Which makes me wonder: do you use the option "Remember me?". It can be a security issue if used on a computer which is shared with several people, but otherwise it should be quite safe. This option allows you to remain logged in, and I wonder if it also helps against time outs.
 
I can confirm this problem here too. While I never mark „remember me“ (and I won’t to do in future) and I do have tight browser settings, the forum logs me out rapidly. Indeed it is annoying when writing posts online. The usable time slot is so narrow, that carefull writing and proper formatting is online practically not possible, at least for me. I do not have always the time to write offline in an editor. So being urged to write fast mispelled wrds ocur mroe foten... but the forum daemons are eager to pick every wrong single character. (Offtoppic: Well... maybe they can automate this once too, as the time spent for this effort could better be used for answering questions, IMHO.) Logging out users that fast may improve the security of the forum, but at least it should be possible to write without being stressed that much. With a proper compromise between security and usabilty, quality of content may improve.

Knowing that this is chit-chat-feedback-area, more feedback to the feedback would be appreciated.

PS: A reason for feeling logged out may also be that your own router shuts the connection to ISP when there is no traffic (while writing). Check your settings. Using the preview feature may help generally, as you won’t be timed out. It would also be nice, if we could know how long it takes before one gets kicked out.
 
IMHO all the inputs are appreciated, but only the admins can do something about it (sorry to be so repetitive). We are in timeout :e
 
Re: Automatically logged out and lost a well elaborated mess

This problem is exacerbated by the strict posting requirement (linked from the MUST READ thread). If you are expecting carefully written, well-researched posts, the time-out should not be less than 4 hours (14400 seconds).

I myself accidentally hit the back button instead of the tab shuffle button. Because of the time-out the forward button asked me to log-in. I had no opportunity to copy & paste because I was not expecting to hit the back button. I should use Lynx (with an external editor) on these forums I guess :p
 
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