Lately I've had the same problem with the site about five times- I log in, look around the new posts and my recent threads, start to post a reply, and then get distracted with something else for a few minutes. It might be that I'm researching a long post and adding links and quotes, or it might be something entirely unrelated to GH. When I finally click submit, the site tells me I need to refresh the page and log in again, because presumably while I've been writing or whatever, the site logged me out.

Twice I've lost long posts because of this, and a few times I've had issues logging back in and so I've just given up and skipped the whole thing. I have other things to do, you know, and usually I wouldn't be able to redo all of that, or it just isn't worth it. I think that generally my posts here have been of fairly high quality, some of which were quite long and many of which took a bit of research. There is a value to long posts here that the settings on the site are disregarding.

This is the first time over the course of years of membership that this has been a recurring problem, so something has clearly been changed, to log people out after periods of session inactivity (and apparently, typing in a comment box DOESN'T COUNT as session activity).

This is ridiculous! This is not a bank, where if I walk away from the computer I appreciate it if the site logs me out so that no one else can steal my money. This is a hybrid discussion forum! You don't need that kind of tight security to keep people from posting as each other. Can you change this so that kind of thing doesn't happen anymore, or not as often?

 

How long are we talking? An hour?

Is it possible you've disabled cookies on your browser?

 

I've had that happen to me too, usually with a long post, or as leahbeatle said, if I've had to go to another site to gather data, and return to finish a post. What I try to do to avoid losing the post is I right-click and copy it, so that if the forum loses my post, I have it saved and can just log back in, then go back and copy & paste the post. Sometimes I forget to do that, though, and it's like....argh.
When it happens, it isn't a really long time period that I've been typing the post, although I haven't actually timed it.

 

I believe there's a setting I can adjust, the inactivity logout period. But there's a compromise between security and convenience. Also, I don't know how long your periods of inactivity are so I wouldn't know what to set it to…

 

The inactivity limit has been doubled to 30 minutes.