[new] catch submitted forum message after inactivity logout

[livelove]

Hi. One problem I am experiencing, is that I am logged out (almost) as frequently as from my bank account, and while I agree that for a bank account you need really tight security measures, I guess for a moviebuff account, it's a little less critical.

I tested with FF3.6 and FF41. Same behaviour.

The problem (apart from the nuisance of repeated logins) is that you lose any typed forum messages (typing a forum message is apparently considered "inactivity", from a technical point of view, lol ).

For example, I logged in just before typing this message, and now (I guess 10-15 minutes later) I wanted to submit it, but it was discarded and I was asked to log in instead. (My impression is that in the forum section, i.e. when submitting a message, it happens much more often than elsewhere on criticker, where I am logged out more rarely, I think. But my impression might be wrong.)

Getting logged out automatically on criticker happens to me quite often and just happened again today, when I wrote a lengthy reply to a film review ... it's all gone too and I don't have the energy to write it down all over again. Assuming this happens to others as well, I guess it would be a good idea to avoid frustration for criticker users by

• 1) either extending the inactivity logout time (I think anything more frequent than once a day is really overkill)
• 2) or adding a checkbox next to the login button allowing for a voluntary 30-day login (like wikipedia etc.)
• 3) or catching the submitted forum message so that after the login the message is submitted rather than discarded[!]

Of course implementing all 3 measures would be best.
If implementing only 1 measure, the last one would be the most helpful one, because in cases where the logout problem occurs not on your side but on the user side (corporate network, browser crashes, cookie issues, cashing issues, etc.), catching the submitted forum message of a currently-not-logged-in user is the only 1 of the 3 that would prevent the message from getting lost.

I hope this report is helpful.

[td888]

This is odd. I almost never get logged out of Criticker. Even restarting my PC, tablet or mobile and going back to the Criticker site, I am always logged in.

Are you sure you don't have a cookie blocker or something as extension in your browser? In that case you should whitelist Criticker.

[livelove]

It's quite possible, that the problem occurs on my end.
That still would not explain, however, why I failed input almost always is a submitted forum message and never any other kind of input (ranking a movie, adding film to own collection, or any other activity that is stored in my user profile, for which I obviously must be logged in just as well).

Anyway, I would suggest not to discard but to catch a forum message submission, so that the message is not discarded, regardless of whether the logging-out problem occurs on the server or user side (which — from the user perspective — does not matter all that much, given that he/she just lost all the work he/she put into writing the message).

It's a question of good website coding/behaviour.

When the criticker receives a forum message submission, it checks from which user account it emanates. If the user account cannot be established, the user must log-in again, that's fine, but after logging in, the message should not be discarded but the user should instead either be brought back to the message composition page or to the "message successfully submitted" page.

[livelove]

@ mpowell: what is the current inactivity logout timeout duration ?

[AFlickering]

i usually stay logged in for a month at a time so this is weird

[livelove]

It just happened to me again, this time just within the short time frame of 5 minutes in between 2 postings on criticker (i.e. first posting got through, second posting 5 minutes later failed with an error and the info in the page's top right corner showed me as logged out).

I had no browser crash, no loss of internet connection, no IP address change, nor any other hiccup, so that reduces (not to zero though) the likelihood of the problem originating on my side.

Anyway, as I explained above, it does not really matter that much, on which side the problem occurs, because submitted messages should not be discarded anyway.

[livelove]

@ mpowell, it's not really on-topic (discarding message),
but just in case you are interested:

I played around a bit and noted that
(A) a message submission request from an unknown user is treated differently from
(B) a message editing request from an unknown user.

(A: message submission)
(1) I open a thread
(2) I click on "reply"
(3) I compose the message
(4) I click on "sign out" (on another tab) to manually simulate the logout problem
(5) in the message composition window I click on "submit"
(6) I receive the following error message (this is the one I encounter regularly and which prompted me to file this report in the first place):

screenshot 1:

(B: message editing)
(1) I click a posting's "edit" button
(2) I edit the posting
(3) same as A4
(4) same as A5
(5) I receive the following error message:

screenshot 2:

The interesting thing is, that although the problem is the same in both cases (A) and (B) — namely that the user is not logged in any longer — the server reacts differently.

Also interesting:
When I log in in screenshot 2, I am immediately taken to screenshot 3, where I have to login a second time:

screenshot 3:


So when an editing request comes from an unknown user, he is taken to 2 login windows back-to-back. That doesn't seem right either.

Whereas in scenario (A) there is not even 1 login prompt. The login has to be done manually.

Adding to the mystery, the login window (screenshot 2) I see when editing a message has 2 options ("hide my online status this session" and "log me on automatically each visit"), whereas the main login window lacks those options (screenshot 3). Why ?

Anyway, as expressed earlier, it's really a side issue for the purpose of my report, because in both scenarios (A) and (B), the text written by the user is lost. And those of us, who already had the "chance" in their lives to write a long e-mail or forum post only to see it disappear due to a technical hiccup, know how frustrating that experience is. So my suggestion would be, not to discard the user-submitted text, but to ask the user to log in and subsequently accept the text submission.

I am not writing this for me. I have learned from such past mistakes and if I don't forget, I save the message to the clipboard before submitting it, but I thought I might report this to prevent others from going through the same problem (and if they do, they are also unlikely to report it after having typed a long text in vain).