Barbara, And Anyone Else Who Gets Logged Out While Posting

[tex]

The system is set to log anyone out, if there is no "activity", for one hour, (where "activity" is defined as navigating to another screen) - IOW, if you are writing a post, the clock is running. If over an hour passes, when you hit the "Submit" button, you will get a log-in screen, instead. When that happens to me, I just click on the "Go back one page" button on my browser, and select all the text in my post, copy it, and then paste it into a "Wordpad" document, for safekeeping. Actually, pasting it into a Wordpad, (or Notepad), document is kind of an overkill, since it will be preserved in the "Clipboard" of your browser, once you copy it. Anyway, this way you have a copy of it for sure. Then click on the "Submit" button again, and when the log-in screen comes up, go ahead and log in. When it returns you to the message box, though, it will be empty, of course. Not to worry, your post is still there, you just need to locate it. Just click on the "Go back one page" button on your browser, twice, and it should take you back to your post. You can then click on the "Submit" button, and the system should successfully enter your post.

Once in a while, that won't work correctly, and that's why I always try to get a copy of a post, before I log back in. When "backpaging" doesn't work, then just paste the copy that you saved on the "Clipboard", into the message box, and submit it. If my computer is acting really "goofy", and I've spent a lot of time writing a long post, I save the Wordpad document somewhere on my computer, so that the post won't be lost, in case I have to close and restart my browser, or even worse, restart the computer. Of course, it's possible to accidentally hit the wrong key, and get logged out that way, too, but when that happens, you may not be able to "backpage" to get to a post.

Okay, back to the business of the system logging us out after one hour of inactivity - actually, that's an arbitrary number that's used as a default selection for most discussion boards, the theory being that an hour should be adequate for most people, for most purposes, and that way, if someone logs on at a public facility, for example, and forgets to log out, the board won't be left open for anyone else who might come along and discover that they are "logged in" - at least it won't be left "vulnerable" for more than an hour. If you are almost finished writing a long post, though, and someone comes to the door, or you get a phone call, an hour can fly by pretty fast, sometimes. Since most of us don't log in at a public facility, (and if we do, hopefully we'll remember to log out when we're finished), I'm going to raise the automatic log-out time threshold to two hours. Hopefully this will solve most of the problems with "lost" posts.

Tex