Logout timing

This website maintains your login for 7 days -- that's right, 168 hours. But if you close your browser, the cookie gets deleted and you start over. The intention is you leave your browser open -- then you should get the full 7 days.

However, you need to make sure your browser settings on cookie expiration is "until they expire" because if you cranked down cookie expiration, your browser will be logging you out more often. In that case, it's not our problem, it's your own cookie settings. Loosen up your cookie expiration settings and you should get the full login term.

WHY SEVEN DAYS, WHY NOT INDEFINITELY?
So the typical next question is why have logins expire at all? Why not just keep people logged in indefinitely.

Each login session takes memory on the server to remember what you've clicked, what you've not clicked, and so on (such as for the new link on Recent Posts). This website can get up to 1000 visitors logged in at any given time, and we can see over 80,000 sessions per month, and more than a million sessions per year. Each of those sessions take server memory, say 1K.

For a million sessions, that's a gigabyte of server memory just keeping track of sessions. For indefinite sessions, that means anyone who has ever logged in over the 11 years this website has been in existence, which is 11GB just tracking login sessions!

There is also a security risk with long login sessions. If a hacker is able to spoof the server into thinking they're a logged in user, they get more priviledged access to this site and can potentially spam the site relentlessly using posting features only meant for logged in users to access.

COMPROMISE: LOGIN DURATION OF ONE WEEK
In speaking with our hosting service about this issue for our website, they recommended a one day login period. We opted instead for a one week login period, even though they felt it was less than ideal.

So we're on your side here -- but we do get hackers using sessions to spam our site, mainly with offensive article submissions or offensive content in support requests. We just delete them, but we get one or more of these roughly every day.

That's the bane of being a popular site -- we're a juicy target for spammers and hackers.

In the next post, how to easily protect yourself from losing content due to an unplanned logout.

Prevent losing a post due to logout

This site has some simple features to help you never lose a post even if you happened to get logged out unexpectedly.

This site automatically saves your edit window approximately every 30 seconds while you are editing.

Prof Klyzlr made a screen capture of the editing window highlighting the save and restore features in case you ever lose an in progress post due to logout.

On the bottom right you see three dashes down arrow and a broom icon.

The three dashes down arrow  lets you pull up a chronological listing of your edit window saves. You can pick a save to have restored back into your edit window, but the list will be very long if you've never cleaned out the list.

Try the one at the very top of the list or the one at the very bottom of the list. One of those should be the contents you're looking for.

The broom "sweeps away" the autosave list, clearing it completely. 

A best practice when you first start composing a longer post is to select the broom first to clear out the autosave list. Then you know what ever you get from the three dashes are autosaves just from your most recent post typing in the editor.

Best Practices

In the over 50 years I have been involved in electronics and online digital application, I find it silly that current day users expect to stay logged in for more than a few hours (even staying logged in for more than a fraction of an hour was abnormal practice in the industry).

Thanks to the Prof (and Joe for reposting) for mentioning the broom and restore features. I "bit the dust" a few times in the past, losing a post that took more than a few minutes to compose while researching on other tabs in the browser.

I love this site. Have fun.

Log in

I never found this to be an issue. I never log in until I have something to say and that is rare. Then, I log out. I just do not need the attention.

I do not see any reason to stay logged into any forum.

Rich

Staying logged in

Although I appreciate Rich's point of view, I'm sure he's saying that he doesn't see any reason for himself to stay logged in. 

I depend on the "new posts" feature (that is only visible when logged in) to evaluate how much I might have missed in a thread so that when I have a few moments to read forum content I can direct my attention to the most active threads among those with topics of interest to me. 

I find it very convenient to be logged in more or less perpetually and appreciate the compromise that Joe has reached. 

Jeff Allen

I only wish that those 3

I only wish that those 3 icons at the bottom were a little more indicative of what they are. Or even say something about what they are if you place your cursor over them??

So many ICONS these days that are just impossible to guess what they are.

Edit saves, staying logged in

I stay logged in all the time- it makes it much faster to figure out what the stuff you haven’t read is.  The once a week auto logout is pretty generous as far as what’s typical on the web goes.

Joe, for the saved edits in the little menu... it would be nice if those were per thread, rather than any edit for the entire forum.  It looks like those edits are saved in cookies, it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to add the thread id to the cookie id and filter then down to only those for the current thread in that popup.  If you wanted to be really cool I think it should also be possible to include the first couple words of saved text in the menu item as you construct the popup from the cookie list. It’s nice the way it is, but you have to be fairly motivated to get any real use out of it, since you have to both plan ahead by “broom”ing periodically, and be motivated enough to hunt through the recent ones for something that resembles what you’re looking for.

(I should note for the record that I’m just good enough at javascript to cause serious trouble, I make sure the client side guys who really know it do a sanity check / cleanup pass on the rare occasions when I have to rampage through the client code while making a server side change.  That’s the context for “it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard” here )

I have never been able to use

I have never been able to use that thing at the bottom effectively. I suspect that my mac and browser choice do not play well with it. I can always find things I am not looking for with it but never what I wanted.

For me it means redoing a post now and then, not a big deal. It also can generally be done with a log out and log in so one has a week to get things done if working on a big blog entry or a long technical reply to an issue with another modeler for example.

The pleasure derived from this site and the participants far outweigh the issues associated with its use.

lost typing on log out?

  I've always been able to hit the back arrow and recover any lost typing then save it and log in and re-submit....DaveB