New Railway Modellers Forums

Hi I have tried to post a question on the site but when I have pressed submit I am taken back and asked to log in after which my carefully crafted post has disappeared needless to say I was logged in but I am a slow typer!
Peter

The same thing happens to me. I post a short section, and then I ammend it again to make it longer. I rarely have been able to post short posts. It is just how I think, as I type around the world and back to answer a simple question that other people will answer in a single sentence.

There's no auto-time out set at our end, in fact yesterday I walked away from one computer which at stopped on a delete Y/N question, got distracted, hours later logged in on another computer realised that the deletion had never taken place, yes I do these daft things like anyone else. Then I returned to the previous computer responded to the Y/N? it didn't do it first time put up the same question and promptly finished what I'd started hours ago. What I think happens to people who often find themselves logged out after a period of slow activity is probably down to the settings in their router. A default time-out is often set by the ISP who sends out routers when you join, it helps their traffic management, or they force a logout from their end for the same reason. If you are happy tweaking things inside your router it's easy to fix if you've never done more than change the default password I'd suggest you leave it alone. A quick work around the problem for slow typers is to write what you want to say in Notepad or a word processor, then copy and paste the text into the editor before submitting it.

That seems to be a plausible explanation, I admit I do have trouble being concise like Mountain.
My wife says it must be my fault, being an old git! still she has offered to type it for me while I dictate.

Having suffered the same fate in the past, I now compose my posts in Word and then just copy the finished article over to the Forum.

An Administrator needs to access the forums ACP and look at the Security page and the settings there. Timeout is adjustable. Default is 7200 seconds which is of course 1 hour Entering a -1 should prevent the forum timing out

adminCP > Security Settings > maximum time to submit forms = xxxx

Forgot I'd set it last time I looked.!
Yup 7200 should be long enough (think it's two hours). You've got to be awfully patient to still be typing two hours later. My incident when I returned to the computer, failed to work immediately, but then worked straight away on a second press which I guess was long enough for remember me to have worked work. Suppose I should have a different password (or user) for ACP but that's just another thing to clog up the RAM (They say it stops getting refreshed once you pass 70).
I've been over this so many times that those who get cut off whilst typing have to be disconnected somewhere between keyboard and server, there's plenty of likely places.
[EDIT]
I should have added but only one of them at each end is under our control, all the rest are out of our reach.

You can always use teh windows notepad, word, notepad++ etc to type your draft and then paste it into the forum - then just click submit - no timeout to worry about.

Bufferstop wrote:What I think happens to people who often find themselves logged out after a period of slow activity is probably down to the settings in their router. A default time-out is often set by the ISP who sends out routers when you join, it helps their traffic management, or they force a logout from their end for the same reason. If you are happy tweaking things inside your router it's easy to fix if you've never done more than change the default password I'd suggest you leave it alone.

It's not the router or the ISP, it's the timeout value on the forum - which relies on cookies that are set on the users computer. The timeout value might be stored in a session on the server or in the database but there will be an identifier cookie that swaps places with the users computer and server with each http request.

Bufferstop wrote:Forgot I'd set it last time I looked.!
Yup 7200 should be long enough (think it's two hours). You've got to be awfully patient to still be typing two hours later. My incident when I returned to the computer, failed to work immediately, but then worked straight away on a second press which I guess was long enough for remember me to have worked work. Suppose I should have a different password (or user) for ACP but that's just another thing to clog up the RAM (They say it stops getting refreshed once you pass 70).
I've been over this so many times that those who get cut off whilst typing have to be disconnected somewhere between keyboard and server, there's plenty of likely places.
[EDIT]
I should have added but only one of them at each end is under our control, all the rest are out of our reach.

7200 seconds is actually 1 hour, please read my post above re the times.
Whether or not a ACP password is the same or different to the user name password is not really applicable - Its the ability to be able to access the ACP I really don't think a stored passwords blocks up RAM! They are a tiny fragment of RAM! Even if stored there??

Flashbang wrote:

Bufferstop wrote:Forgot I'd set it last time I looked.!
Suppose I should have a different password (or user) for ACP but that's just another thing to clog up the RAM (They say it stops getting refreshed once you pass 70).

7200 seconds is actually 1 hour, please read my post above re the times.
Whether or not a ACP password is the same or different to the user name password is not really applicable - Its the ability to be able to access the ACP I really don't think a stored passwords blocks up RAM! They are a tiny fragment of RAM! Even if stored there??

He's joking about the ram - look, he refers to age. When he mentions ram he's talking about his own memory lol.

Bufferstop wrote: I've been over this so many times that those who get cut off whilst typing have to be disconnected somewhere between keyboard and server, there's plenty of likely places.

The http protocol (your browser uses this) doesn't maintain a live connection to the forums server. Instead everytime you click a button, link, type a url, click a bookmark etc it opens a TCP socket to the server and sends a http request - this is multiple lines of text stating the url / path, hostname (domain) the types of replies it accepts and various other things. You don't get to see that as it's hidden (unless you use a plugin) however I can assure you it happens. The server then parses this data and in the case of a php file will pass the request variables (those things after the ? in the address bar) to the php program installed on the server. PHP will then run the requested script on the server (in the case of the forum it will pull topics out of the database, replies, statistics etc) and then generate a html page. Once that's done it will (via the same TCP network connection) send back reply headers stating the content type, size, various others followed by a blank line. After that blank like comes the content - html source code. The browser then uses the html to construct and display the page on your screen.

There is no connection being lost - PHP does not run as a live process 24/7, it's simply started on request to run the requested script - and then it terminates.

As I said previously, this is a timeout setting in the database. That's all it is.

Your answer is worthy of A+ at A level, how do I know? The senior examiner for International A Level (Cambridge) Peers over my shoulder from time to time whilst I'm typing! The time out is buried on a page on a tab in the Admin Control Panel, which I've only ever visited a couple of times previously and I'd completely overlooked it in my first response.
However logic says that a global setting which only affects a few users is a fairly unlikely scenario, so provided it's value is not far too short the answer lies elsewhere. Which raises the question of is it worth expending a lot of effort to find the real culprit. I've put this question to the rest of the team? If we decide to investigate it will probably need to start with a long questionnaire to those affected, which isn't ideal if they are slow typists.
We'll do what we can.

I expect the reason it only affects a few is due to peoples typing speed and / or length of their posts.

The other thing you could recommend is to try wiping cookies - I have seen it where phpBB can get a tad confused over these at times and so clearing them will often solve it.