hey, I'm sure there are a few places that do this on the site, but maybe it's the same script that is responsible for all such occurances:

when i was writing a PM a while ago, I got waaay distracted and left it idle for a long time.  Naturally, my login expired and I forgot, so I pushed the send button anyway.  The result on such cases is a friggin mile-long page of generated red exclamation points with sporatic intelligent messages littering the page about the following:

Invalid Last Name
Must include a Message
MP3 was not completely uploaded
MP3 was not completely uploaded

the above which are scattered amongst various lines, and gets repeated as a block 12 times. (no seriously, 12)

Can't it just show a single red exlamation point and say that "Your session has expired.  Click here to log in again" blah blah?   That would SOOO be infinitely better.  It's really not hard for the site to detect an expired session BEFORE it tries to parse the PM text box line by line, giving a red exlamation point for every word it tries to process.

Thanks
Tim

Even better: How about making the notification go like this:

Unable to post:
[the post you tried to post]

Your session has expired. Click here to log in again.


That way the post you were writing can be copied and pasted after logging back in and isn't lost in cyberspace. Idea?

Very good idea.
But hasn't the login time been extended? I thought this a while back but it wasn't true, but now I'm convinced that it is, only a few days ago I went off to have some food came back and I was still logged in !!
Cant the comments be written into a cooky or something like that, the forum script I used for the 'bA emergency forum' has something like that. I've even turned my PC off and the comments I wrote were still in the box when I 'restored session' some time later.

well, ultimately, I'm alright with the session's time until expiration... it's just unprofessional (and rather bizarre) that the site dish out so many useless and incorrect error messages when such a thing really DOES occur.

as for the time it takes before the logout automatically happens... i'm generally just fine with it, because (like you said) it tends to last a good long time.  for this round of complaining, i'm just mostly interested in making a change in the script that processes such "illegal" posts.

(i imagine that this same error would occur to a guest who tries to push the "submit" button without logging in.)

But guests dont get the comment box so they cant submit......theres no submit button...I think!
I like PXs idea that the script could detect that you have a comment but that you've 'timed-out' and so warn you to copy or anything before you lose it to the cyber-bin!
Though I think it would be easier (says he who is not programming the site and understands nothing!! of databases) to have the comments written into a cooky with a few hours session time !!??

[edit] Putting comments into cookies that are connected to that particular 'post comment page' would also help the people who accidentally hit a link or the back button or something while in mid comment mode, darting around the site, looking for quotes or links....you know how it goes!
If these comments were written into cookies they would be retrievable even from 'open recent - history' button. (for a few hours at least)

BTW REALLY like the 'music' page TK 

yeh, i dunno how much info can be put into a cookie.  there's probably a nice cleaner way to remember comments though....

i'd simply just put a script into place that runs as you push the "post" button, which would check your php session to see if it's still valid.  if it's not valid, then give a dialog box that says that the site has logged you.  The OK button could log you back in, and the cancel button would just cancel the forum post.

that honestly seems the simplest to me