Thanks, Sam. I feel better about the whole thing. At least I can stop being paranoid about it.

I think I will try to work around it. I could make some kind of simple move so they know I'm still there. Maybe back and then forward at the end of each paragraph might restart the clock.
Howard

> > Does anybody else have this same experience? What does RinkWorks have that these other sites don't?
>
> Ugh, I have nothing but loathing for the kind of ordeal you describe. What those sites have is something called "session tracking." It means that you login to the site, and if you take too long to do something, the system thinks you just closed your browser and went away, so it logs you out.
>
> Then, when you go to do something on the page that was left open, it says, "Hmmm, who is this?" and makes you log in again.
>
> Well-written sites that do session tracking will remember what you were *going* to do and return you to that exact thing after making you log in again. But most, in my experience, inexplicably do not, so after you log in again, you have to redo everything. It's inexcusable.
>
> A site that does session tracking should do two things to remain usable: (1) return you to the activity you were doing when it interrupts you to log in again, (2) not have such a short time-out time. On that second point, it may be important for online banking sites, or any other sites that involve access to funds, to boot you out of your account after a smallish idle time, but any other site that thinks it needs a short timeout time has an inflated sense of its own importance.
>
> The RinkWorks Message Forum doesn't have that problem because you don't login to it, and if I did require you to login, I wouldn't have a timeout time on your session.
>
> It's simpler, which means there is less chance of things going wrong. The downside is the lack of certain types of features. For example, you can't configure settings or preferences that the system remembers when you log in another day -- imagine if the message forum automatically remembered your name and email and filled them in for you. Plus, it does not prevent someone else from using your username and impersonating you, to potentially damaging effect.
>
> A forum as simple as this one doesn't really need the kinds of features you get when you support user accounts and session tracking. Others, especially online shopping sites, need them.
>
> But whether a site does it or not, there's no excuse for doing it badly.