Eliminate or lengthen the page timeout for Client Area

[tgonhawk1]

It seems that if you login to the Client Area, and fail to be active for some (unstated) amount of time,
your login expires or something, and you have to login again.

Under some circumstances, perhaps most, this a very minor annoyance, but an annoyance nevertheless.

However, there is at least one scenario where it is a major pain: while you're writing a ticket.

It goes like this:

• Click to open ticket
• Start writing your description
• Realize that you need to try something or look something up, and this takes a while.
• Now you have the information you need and resume writing your ticket description.
• Perhaps having spent quite some time composing a brilliantly clear description of your ticket,
  you click "Submit".
• and BOOM! it says "This page is restricted" and you have to login again

What makes this especially annoying is that all that great work you did writing the ticket is now GONE!
and there is no way to get it back, short of redoing it all.

While I understand having the page expire for security reasons (e.g. someone using a public computer left it open),
I'd just as soon it didn't do that at all, or failing that, at least up the timeout interval to, say, 30 minutes or more.

[Brian]

I'll open a dialogue with our team today about this and see if it's something we're comfortable with. If we did increase the timeout it wouldn't be by a massive amount since at a point there is no reason to keep a session active (especially to the client area) if there is no activity, even more so when you're dealing with potentially sensitive info that is accessible through the client area (name, email, address, domain names, hosting services, etc).

I know it's not an ideal solution but if you are writing an extended ticket / issue report using a local notepad might be better than the ticket form directly. Unfortunately the scenario you've described does not come up enough for us to develop/implement a 'Draft' feature for tickets.

[tgonhawk1]

Thanks for that reply, which is not an unreasonable position to take.

However, I would point out that, if someone is using a private (e.g. at-home) computer,
there is no reason to worry about leaked credentials, etc.  If they are using a public computer,
that is a whole different story, and they should be taking appropriate precautions anyway.

One other point is that when the timeout does occur, there should be some immediate notification.
This would avoid compounding the problem when you come back to a dead-but-you-don't-know-it-yet
page, continue working, only to find out the bad news when you hit SUBMIT, and thereby losing even
more work.