Forum is kicking me out at bad times
Paul Baker
Posts: 6,351
I have experienced a frustrating problem with the forums within the last week or two. Several times I will be posting and when I submit, I get the equivalent of a "your not logged in" message. When I try to sign in again using the dialog provided with the message, authentication never works. And when I press the back button to get back to the message, the post disappears. I have lost two lengthy messages so far and had to retype them. This is aggrevating to say the least. I know the cookie providing authorization expires after a week, but I delete my cookies more frequently than that, so I know thats not the issue.
So my complaint boiled to its essence is two pronged:
1) please correct whatever is not working with this ancillary authorization dialog since it doesn't ever seem to work.
and/or
2) please keep the text of a post in a tempfile to refill the editor when the page is navigated away from then returned to. You can set the tempfile to automatically delete itself·after a reasonable time has elapsed for garbage collection purposes. I noticed that the quickposts are saved and refilled, since this has also happened when posting via quickpost and the·text is there when the back button is pressed.
Thank you,
Paul
PS the curt tone of this message is frustration, not anger.
So my complaint boiled to its essence is two pronged:
1) please correct whatever is not working with this ancillary authorization dialog since it doesn't ever seem to work.
and/or
2) please keep the text of a post in a tempfile to refill the editor when the page is navigated away from then returned to. You can set the tempfile to automatically delete itself·after a reasonable time has elapsed for garbage collection purposes. I noticed that the quickposts are saved and refilled, since this has also happened when posting via quickpost and the·text is there when the back button is pressed.
Thank you,
Paul
PS the curt tone of this message is frustration, not anger.
Comments
Jim
The authentication on this site is managed through session state and cookies. You have cookies enabled, so there has to be something going on with the session. I have seen situations where some firewalls create a new session whith each round trip to the server. This isn't a problem if cookies are enabled since the cookie contains the information needed to identify your member account.
Another possibility is the session timeout. I believe the timer is set to 20 minutes. Basically, if you take more than 20 minutes to click on any link on the page, the session times out. That is easy to do if you are composing a thoughtful message of any significant length. That might be a likely culprit if you lose large posts.
Please take a look at your cookie settings to ensure that they are enabled for this site. If you are running a firewall (software firewalls seem to do this more often than hardware firewalls), can you check to see if has a setting to retain a session with your browser? I will take a look at the log files when I get into the office tomorrow. There might be a clue in there as to what is going on between roundtrips to the server. I can also increase the session timeout to 30 minutes to see if that helps. Please keep in mind that we might have to back that down a bit if the server starts drowning in inactive sessions. I'll let you know if we ever have to do that.
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Jim
Parallax IT Dept.