It is a big problem for me because I think while I compose and sometimes go away to research something mid-composition before holding forth on it as if I knew what I was going on about. Those who are so brilliant they can compose quickly from already fully formed ideas would find 60 minutes more than adequate. Those who cannot, like me, find it damnably short and arbitrary.crfriend wrote:If I am not mistaken, the timeout window that's in force to log folks out who are idle is 60 minutes, so unless one composes really, really slowly shouldn't be a problem. If it is a problem, occasionally hitting the "preview" button will reset the counter and give one an impression of what his finished post will look like -- which is a good idea for a few reasons.weeladdie18 wrote:Perhaps the problem is with long undrafted posts.
I also have trouble with inputs that timeout while I'm glancing away to see the next group of numbers I need to enter. I once saw a lady who couldn't use an ATM because it timed out on her every try. She had a condition that made her hands very shakey so it took a long time between keypresses. The message "do you need more time" comes up, and if you aren't quick enough to respond to that it assumes your answer is "no" and logs out. Stupid, since if it has figured out that you might need more time it should know enough to be extra patient when it asks that question, for people who actually need extra time.
Programmers program based on their arbitrary conceptions of what "reasonable" is and even when they anticipate things well they still do the wrong things about them. It's like those credit-card number input fields that require that one not type the spaces. The effort that goes into doing the space-detection error-handling is greater than the effort to just strip out all spaces before processing. Proof that people can be smart but still quite gormless. $a~=/ //.
But I digress. I lose track of time when posting quite late at night. The preview button has become my friend but still safer than that is Ctrl-A Ctrl-C. It's hard to know in advance when a post will be long enough to justify it, but composing offline in Notepad is something I do sometimes too.
The longer the timeout period the more you stand to lose when it finally times out. Gmail solves that problem with frequent auto-saves. For SC making the timeout shorter not longer might be better for users. Like 2 minutes. If you can't type it in 2 minutes then it's probably too long anyway, and in any case you'll only lose a max of 2 minute's work not an hour's work.