zedingrove
There seems to be a 20 minute timeout on forum posting -- yes, I know, that's much too short and should probably be changed to an hour in the server configuration to reduce that happening, But so far it hasn't been done.
Though increasing the server timeout would be a quick temporary fix, there are probably better ways that the forum software could cope with this problem.
Now that most of the other problems have been ironed out, its probably time the developers made this a high priority. The developers will not see it in Help, but there a forum tag specifically for forum feedback and I'll suggest one of the educators moves it there.
@ianmorland
One of the problems is that when the server times out, the red error that comes up tells the user to try refreshing the screen. This isn't good advice, because refreshing the screen will immediately lose the user reply unless it is first copied to the clipboard. Then a completely new reply has to be started and the clipboard pasted into the new device.
OK, so that's not too complicated for more experienced users and I suspect many of us have to do that three times per day. But I think it's too complicated for the average user and completely impossoble for a newcomer, because that procedure isn't explained in the error message.
Instead, perhaps you could:
- set a timer for 2 minutes less than the server timeout
- as a background process, determine the current Follow state, simulate changing it to something else and then set it back how it was. Or, perform any other innocuous process that will reset the server timeout.
I'd expect this would ensure the server has not timed out when the user finally posts the reply, no matter how long it takes and provided they don't actually close the close window -- which ought to be detected and discouraged.
