Minor annoyance with forum software

I find that I often spend a fair amount of time researching and answering a question on the forum. If I spend a great deal of time with the forum open, but not moving around in it I find that the system show that I have read all of the messages in the forum even though I have not. I am farily certain this must be a session timeout (or the PHP equivelent), but was wondering if there was any way to avoid it. I'm not sure exactly how long this time period is. This has annoyed me for some time, but I've just lived with it.

Thought I'd see how other people felt about the issue or if other people experience it.

Thanks,

I just periodically hit the page refresh button. I don't know what the timeout here is, on IIS servers usually 5-20 minutes and your session is gone.

Oh, this isn't a forum code problem, this is a web server issue.

Granted, the server is controlling the session, however the forum code is deciding that if the session variable times out that all messages have been read.

What you can do is go to http://forums.aspfree.com/online.php which automatically refreshes every 1 minute I think. This will keep your session open.

No it's not the forum code that decides when sessions time out. If you open a page in your browser and drive out to Cucamonga and back, you'll see the same page on your screen but the server timed out your session long ago. Your activity (or inactivity) from your browser decides when or if sessions time out, not any server application code.

Hi Doug,

I understand and agree with you concerning the fact that the server controls the duration of the Timout although you can control this to some extent with code that is not the issue I was bringing up. The point is what happens when the session times out. Most likely in the global.asa or hidden elsewhere is a subroutine that is called when the session ends either by timing out or by logging off, etc... This is where I assume the system is being told that all current threads have been read.

For example when I work on a shopping cart system if the session times out I clear the temporary data stored in my SQL server for that session number. I could as easily do something else with it, like create a log of items that people put in a cart but did not order. Whatever I wanted. I assume the same thing applies here. When the session times out the application decides what to do and in this case it appears that it has been decided to mark all available threads as having been read.

As I said to begin with this is really just a very minor annoyance. I truly enjoy the forums at ASPfree and find them to be more active than any other ASP related sites I have seen. The long term people here are generally very knowlegeable and generally don't poke fun at the novices too much. I enjoy helping out where I can as I'm sure you see from my posts.

This issue isn't worth too much effort, I just thought I'd see if anyone else had noticed it and had ideas about it, but as a last bit I will say to those who responded by mentioning to refresh or go to a page that auto-refreshes, I sometimes spend over 20 minutes typing into a reply page. If I were to refresh I would lose all the work I had put into the response.

Anyway thanks to all,

Neal.