new message timeouts

[Kelly]

I've received a few e-mails about lost messages... basically, you're writing a message for a long time and when you finally hit Send, the forum asks you to login again... and maybe your message is lost? Well, I found the problem. The new server's PHP session timeout values were set to 24 minutes. That means if you took longer than 24 minutes to write a message, you timed out and the server forgot that you were logged in.

I've changed the timeout to 64 minutes... so you have up to 64 minutes to write an individual message. Should be ample time for everyone now. Apologies if you lost your message previously... I never thought about a timeout being an issue, now I understand it better.

As always, if you have any other problems with the site please E-MAIL me (click on the Contact Us button at the bottom), or send me a private message here.

Kelly

[H2Obuffalo]

If I may add a note on this topic, I would like to tell everyone that if you experience the same "time-out" phenomenon (even with the much longer limit) and your message seems to disappear, here's news: Your message is *not* lost yet.

Yes, you read that right. The current software is actually smarter than we tend to give it credit for. I myself- being longwinded- exceeded the old limit several times and my message seemed to be gone. However, I tried to stay calm and just signed in as prompted. Low and behold, the software had the original message in storage and it was posted automatically as soon as I signed in as requested. You just have to give the program a few moments to work. In this situation, it really knows what its doing and it does it very well. Perhaps the only improvement that might be suggested to whoever originally wrote the forum software might be: When switching to the login prompt, please TELL the user that their message is not lost and that it will be posted as soon as they sign in below.

Until such a change is ever made, the best advice is to follow the instructions on the cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Don't Panic". Just calmly sign in, give the software a little while to work, and your "lost" message will be posted as if nothing had happened.

HTH

-H2Obuffalo