Is there a way to stop being logged out so often?

All other forums I use allow users to stay logged in indefinitely. I notice that these forums log me out a some brief period (one hour?). Maybe I missed the setting and I am just dumb, but it is kind of annoying to have to log in many times per day. What am I doing wrong?

Edit: Also I see I typoed the title, how can I edit the title?

Edit2: What does the “watch topic” setting do? I enabled it on another topic but nothing seems to happen.

Welcome to the forum Reg.
I don’t think you can set it to stay logged in indefinitely.
I pretty sure you can’t edit the title.
I’ve not used it but would expect if “watch topic” was set, for you to be emailed when a new posting to the topic was made. May be it doesn’t work!

AIUI ROOL know the forum is less than ideal but the software it is based on, has now been abandoned so tweaking things would not be a good use of resources and migrating to something else would need more resources than is available for the foreseeable future.

I’ve got used to getting logged out every night, and at one time we used to get logged out randomly at other times too. But not recently in my experience.

I would be much more comfortable if the current timeout could be extended to seven days or something.

From what I’ve seen so far, the current timeout is based upon the time since last page view, and it appears to be quite short. Not sure how long but feels like about one hour or so.

BTW: Thanks to whomever edited the title.

I’ve not yet received an email regarding a watched topic. If it is broken then maybe someone can consider this bug report.

I log in here most weekday mornings around 8:30-9:00 and remain logged in all day without problems. I leave the PC on overnight with the forum home page open (Firefox) and will have been auto logged off again the following morning. Probably either a session timeout or a forum restart for backup or similar?

…auto logged off again the following morning.

And don’t you find that annoying? I guess I am the only one. It does make me reluctant to visit again, knowing I’ll have to jump through all the hoops again. If I had to do this every day for months or years … well that is a lot of extra time I could have used for something else.

It only takes a couple of seconds – LastPass is set to auto log me in for this site. Once a day is no issue for me.

I assume the forum software has a single value defined somewhere that can be changed. Think of all the time people could have saved by simply changing a single value.

It only takes a couple of seconds – LastPass is set to auto log me in for this site. Once a day is no issue for me.

You are defending the short timeout? It shouldn’t really need such heavy duty solutions like external software to fix such a simple thing.

I think that one of the reasons they can’t increase the session timer is because of a design flaw when it comes to banning accounts – a ban will only fully take effect once your current session timer expires, which has caused problems in the past where a spam bot that’s been banned has been able to continue to post hundreds of messages to the forums.

So if you happen to know of a web developer who’s not afraid to get knee-deep in Rails code, feel free to point them towards ROOL!

spam bot

Wow, a spam bot can register here?! It took me about 15 minutes just to prove to the capture thing that I was human. Maybe those spam bots are more human than I am? Geez, the mind boggles.

So if it is a flaw then why can’t the original devs fix it? Is it abandon-ware?

I can only imagine the code for the “post” button, but:

if user == loggedin && user != banned

 … //place post in the DB

One of the reasons I was attracted to RISC OS was because it is paid-ware. I thought that meant support was available to make things run nice and smooth.

Wow, a spam bot can register here?! It took me about 15 minutes just to prove to the capture thing that I was human. Maybe those spam bots are more human than I am? Geez, the mind boggles.

It might not necessarily be a bot that registers; it could be a human that then hands over the account to a bot.

So if it is a flaw then why can’t the original devs fix it? Is it abandon-ware?

I think the state of the website backend can be summarised as follows:

• Most components are out of date
• Upgrading them is hard (lots of breaking changes, new bugs to replace old ones, etc.)
• The custom account/login system that ties all the components together will need updating
• The developer who originally created it hasn’t been able to find the time to make any significant headway on any of the above

Check Andrew Hodgkinson’s posting history for the full gory details.

One of the reasons I was attracted to RISC OS was because it is paid-ware. I thought that meant support was available to make things run nice and smooth.

Sadly this hasn’t yet reached the point where ROOL have any paid employees; everything is being done in people’s spare time, with any money that comes in either being spent on day-to-day expenses (server hosting, travel expenses for visiting shows, etc.) or being funnelled back into the bounty system to try and foster OS development/community growth (emphasis on the “try” part, because the bounty system is averaging around one bounty task completion per year)

I thought that meant support was available to make things run nice and smooth.

That’s the intention and little by little they are doing that . . . to the OS.

It took me about 15 minutes just to prove to the capture thing that I was human.

Slave labour. People get paid pennies per billion captchas solved.

Think of all the time people could have saved by simply changing a single value.

Think of all the time that could be saved if people used a better browser. Firefox on the PC, Firefox and stock on my phone, Safari on the iPad. All remember my passwords and prompt when I log in. Couldn’t be simpler…

One of the reasons I was attracted to RISC OS was because it is paid-ware.

You pay the license fee to Castle but ROOL is not Castle, they get nothing

…auto logged off again the following morning.

And don’t you find that annoying? I guess I am the only one.

Since I’m quite used to it¹ There’s also the issue of long unattended sessions like that can leave spinning processes in systems.
That said I’ve forgotten to log out before now and despite putting the laptop here in suspend the log in token is still active a couple of days later.
Mostly session drops are either activity on the server forcing a disconnect or a user machine losing it’s connection to the net.²

So if it is a flaw then why can’t the original devs fix it? Is it abandon-ware?

In brief, yes. The forum software is indeed effectively abandon-ware.

¹ Cisco ISE has a crappy flash dependent GUI that logs you out after about 15-20 minutes of inactivity. I also manages to lock up the dynamic update of the “live logs” display in even less time. So, I’m most definitely used to much worse.

Probably either a session timeout or a forum restart for backup or similar?

The forum shuts down for 15-20 minutes at around 5am. I forget if that’s my five or your five… ;-)

And don’t you find that annoying?

Not at all. What I find annoying are those places where you have to jump through hoops in order to log out.

Look, I’m dropping a fiction series on my blog (one story a week) and I have been accompanying them with YouTube playlists of songs from the late eighties (around when the stories are set). Last Friday I wanted to put together a playlist, so I found the first song and … was told by Google that I had to log in to add something to a playlist. And since “Log in” was blue and underlined, I clicked on it.
The screen refreshed, the video reloaded, and I was logged in. No password prompt. Just nicely automatic, and granting FULL access to my YouTube account.
The last time I had logged in? The week previous. From a different IP (as a router reboot will assign a new IP address).
Thanks Google, the annoying company trying to foist SSL on the world “because security”, who arbitrarily killswitched a working version of Docs on an older iOS “because security”, who want to push technologies such as OAuth “because security”… let a person log in as a user a week after they last logged in without asking for the password. Clever, that.

Being asked to sign in from time to time isn’t a traumatic experience. It’s sensible.

I can only imagine the code for the “post” button, but:

Why imagine? I think it’s from line 51, but I know exactly zero Ruby/Rails/whatever: https://www.riscosopen.org/tracker/repository/file/rool/rails/beast/trunk/app/controllers/posts_controller.rb

The forum software is indeed effectively abandon-ware.

Not only that, but I should point out that Beast is designed to be a functional forum system using the absolute minimal amount of code: A small, light-weight forum in Rails with a scary name and a goal of around 500 lines of code when we’re done.
That is tied into a sort of “hub” that manages logins, for other parts of the ROOL site (the bug tracker, for instance, is not the forum). That’s why it is more complicated to kick off a spammy user…

At any rate, it isn’t a bad setup for its ~500 lines of code. It’s just a shame it wasn’t further developed to add some of the sorts of things that are common elsewhere, such as sticky topics and… as noted above, wondering whether or not “watch topic” actually does anything.

During the first login, there is an option for how long you wish to login. The default time is set to 60 minutes, that ’s why you logged out after a period of time. Got this tip from UUkeys and it is very effective.