Question Sessions length?

Hi guys,

i have received the following message from one of the moderators on my forum yesterday: "lot of users have problem with the timeout for writing posts, if they write longer post after hitting the send button they get error message and they mostly need to login again, so they loose the written text. The second issue is with the marking of read posts, for example yesterday i had 12 unread topics, i have opened one, and left the browser on that post, went out for a coffee brake and afterward all messages were marked as read. I have this problem on multiple computers/browsers so it's not something with my pc.."

Any idea how can i sort this out? For the first issue i assume i should increase the session lifetime in the kunena configuration (currently is on 1800), but what about the second one? Also any advice for the session lifetime lengths is welcomed.

thanks
Baze

General >> Basic settings >> Session Lifetime is what you search for. Put something useful like 6 hours (in seconds).

Probably a stupid question but is Kunena session lifetime related to Joomla session lifetime? can they be different?

yes they can be different.

Joomla session limit = how long you stay logged in limimt.

Kunena session limit = how long new threads keep the new flag once you have logged in

idaea: A better way to do this imho would be for kunena devs to code it more like emails so that a message stays new untill it is read or marked as read, rather than use a time limit on them.

Personally I want to keep my messages as unread until I either read them or mark them as read. I also want to mark messages unread time to time, so that I can find them later. But there are users who want to see only the messages written after last logout as new.

So in my opinion this new indication should be user setting with limits and default value defined by site admin.

We had it both ways in the past the permanent NEW messages are a pain on larger forums. If anything this needs to be configurable or separate from each other. There could be both NEW since last visit and NEVER READ.

As for the timeout issue:

This must be a bug. It should not matter how long the sessions are setup. The New Topic page should send periodic KEEP ALIVE signals to the server. If people get logged out we need to look into this potential problem.