Session timeout after 2 hours

[Ian McIntosh]

Please note that the forums have a 2 hour session limit. If you keep a forum page open for longer than two hours continuously, you will be required to log-in again when you next load a page. In most cases this will not affect you, but if you are creating a large post, or editing while doing other things you may find your session times out and you could lose your work.

If you think you may need to work over a longer period you can do one of several things:

• Make your edits in an off-line text editor then copy and paste the finished work into a forum post.
• Use the "Save" button regularly to store your work-in-progress.
• Submit your partly completed post, then use the "Edit" button to re-open it for further mark-up.
• If all else fails, work faster

The timeout is imposed for security reasons, e.g. to minimise abuse by closing sessions accidentally left open on public computers. The default setting in our forum software is 3600s but this was felt to be too restrictive, given that we may often find ourselves distracted by other work part way through composing a lengthy post, so the session time has been doubled, effective from September 12th, 2009.