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Re: Suggestion for those who wrote a long response that got lost because you have to login again

Posted: Sun Apr 07, 2019 7:33 pm
by PfifltriggPi
rdearman wrote:
PfifltriggPi wrote:
lavengro wrote:Just in case the 05:48 train from Paddington station were poised to come through and run amok.


Is this an expression of which I am unaware, or something which actually happens? Either way, I'm rather intrigued.

I believe they are referring to the Captha questions, one or two of which are about what time some train leaves some station. :)


Oh, I see. :D

Re: Suggestion for those who wrote a long response that got lost because you have to login again

Posted: Sun Apr 07, 2019 9:32 pm
by StringerBell
aravinda wrote:the last few months or so this website has been kicking me out every few minutes (more like seconds). And during the last few days, in addition to logging me out, it has been logging me in as soon as I enter my password (without having to click). It's better in the sense that it is one click less but it looks weird.
I wouldn't have bothered if it was another website. I'd have simply left. The amount of activity we still see here is an indication as to how much we like/value/addicted to this forum.


This is my experience 100%.

jeff_lindqvist wrote:A simple copy/paste before submitting has done the job for me for the past 20 years.


Because I get kicked every time I try to post, I do this, too. I login, write a post, copy that post, click submit, get logged out, log back in, and paste.

I just wanted to suggest using the browser to go back to anyone who doesn't do this and thinks they lost the post they just spent some time writing.

Re: Suggestion for those who wrote a long response that got lost because you have to login again

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:09 am
by badger
aokoye wrote:There are those occasional times, however, when I am clicking from tab to tab and accidently close out of the tab with whatever text I was writing.

most browsers will restore a closed tab if you hit ctrl-shift-t.

Re: Suggestion for those who wrote a long response that got lost because you have to login again

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2019 3:49 am
by aokoye
badger wrote:
aokoye wrote:There are those occasional times, however, when I am clicking from tab to tab and accidently close out of the tab with whatever text I was writing.

most browsers will restore a closed tab if you hit ctrl-shift-t.

Oh I restore tabs all the time, but the text you entered remaining isn't 100%.

Re: Suggestion for those who wrote a long response that got lost because you have to login again

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2019 10:40 pm
by Serpent
There are also add-ons (and programs) that save all your text. Lazarus was great but it's not available for the newer versions of Firefox :cry:
There are also clipboard managers that allow you to go back to what you copied previously (for example if you accidentally hit PrintScreen and replace your text with a random screenshot). Admittedly in my case it just makes me want to copy things less often, as I don't want to clutter my history :lol:

In Russia Punto Switcher is (was?) very popular, but it only works for the English-Russian pair. It helps you switch between the languages if you're typing gibberish, but of course it doesn't know if your text is perfectly correct in another language. It also lets you keep a history of everything you've typed (not sure if that's optional).

Re: Suggestion for those who wrote a long response that got lost because you have to login again

Posted: Tue Apr 09, 2019 4:51 am
by Querneus
*cough cough* It is possible to recover a post you seemingly lose from a log-in screen with some trickery.

The instructions are basically:
0. Press Preview or Submit
1. Encounter the Login Screen of Death ("You need to login in order to...")
2. Enter your username and password and log in
3. Encounter the posting page completely empty
4. Press the Back button (or Alt+LeftArrow) and encounter the login page again
5. Refresh the page (pressing F5)
6. Voilà, your long post has been recovered. You will see it ready to edit if you pressed Preview in step 0, or you will find if already posted to the thread if you pressed Submit.

The technical explanation for why this works when you press Submit in step 0 is that modern browsers save the initial GET or POST page requests you make, and try to reapply them when refreshing a page. When a user previews or submits a post, a POST request is made containing the written post in the "message" parameter of the form data sent. Therefore, if you go back to your attempt at previewing/posting a post after getting a new session ID from the server, the combination of the new session ID (obtained by the browser by checking the cookie at that moment) plus the saved POST request will recover your long post and submit it to the forum. Regarding the effect when pressing Preview, Chrome at least seems to save form contents as long as it's the same step in the tab's browsing history.

Technically, if you're using a browser with Developer Tools (Chrome or Firefox on a laptop or desktop machine), you could recover your post faster by doing the following:
0. Press Preview or Submit
1. Encounter the Login Screen of Death
2. Open the Developer Tools (presssing F12 in Chrome and Firefox for Windows/Linux), and selectt the Network tab
3. Press F5
4. Examine the POST request sent to posting.php

Re: Suggestion for those who wrote a long response that got lost because you have to login again

Posted: Tue Apr 09, 2019 9:16 am
by Iversen
On the previous page Zenmonkey concluded that our problems aren't local, and thats also my impression - I can't see any effect of cleaning out my history and/or my cache, and the 'you have tried too many times' thing happens in wawes with no reference to what I have done on my machine. So I now use the Login-again, back, refresh procedure almost every time I write one of my longer rants. There is one little thing that I would like to mention, namely that you may see you message in without your latest changes right after logging in again. But the newest version will reappear if you hit the Back button (ALT <-) - at least on my old Firefox.

EDIT: It also happened with this short message

Re: Suggestion for those who wrote a long response that got lost because you have to login again

Posted: Wed Apr 10, 2019 10:15 am
by rdearman
Morgana wrote:
rdearman wrote:
Morgana wrote:If people try these steps, does it solve the logging out problem for you?
rdearman wrote:1) log out of the forum.
2) clear your browser cache and all cookies for this site.
3) log back in and tick the "remember me" option

If this doesn't work, try one additional step between 1 and 2 of rebooting your router to get a new IP address (most people are on dynamic IP addresses)
They have worked for me, so if you have this problem it's probably worth a shot trying them.

These instructions were onky to solve the IP and cache issues we had when migrating over to a new system of load balancing. Not valid generally.
If I follow these instructions every time I visit the forum, I do not experience the logging out issue. If I do not follow these instructions, for example by failing to tick the "Remember Me" box, I do experience the logging out issue as described by others in this thread. So for at least my case, these instructions do still currently apply to the logging out issue. I thought, since they still help me avoid this problem, they might help someone else. I don't know why they work for me if this is no longer the problem going on, but they do.

They might work, but they aren't guaranteed to work. After some discussion with EMK we think the problem lies in either the configuration of the load balancer, or the way phpBB processes cookies passed between load-balanced connections. To fix this will probably involve a couple days of technical work on the configuration and setup of the systems. The snag of course is both emk and myself are too busy to dedicate the 2-3 days to isolate the issue and do all the reconfiguration work.