I’ve always assumed it’s that either some page specific token has expired, or that the real state of the page has changed relative to what is currently shown in the browser window you’re submitting from. So I just as force of habit always keep a local copy of whatever I’m about to submit until it’s successfully submitted - but agree it would be nice to handle this better. There are certain challenges with any system allowing people to update records in parallel, their changes don’t always merge cleanly together ‘automatically’.
I think if it’s possible to warn you of a problem before the problem occurs then it’s also possible to just avoid the problem and do something that makes it not occur - so I don’t think the suggested ‘feature request’ here (to add a timeout warning) is the best answer, but I’d support making this a wakeup call on the bug report to implement better behaviour in this case.
Thanks for linking to the bug report. If that’s the case, then the warning message should likely be changed/different as well to something that doesn’t refer to signing in (like a general time out message).
Not sure if it is best to treat this as a bug report or feature request (I guess it depends on whether the time out is functioning as intended or not).
I’m pretty sure that the security token for every page expires after 24 hours. For the Uploader we offer the user a chance to keep the data and refresh the token if it expires, but that’s not the case for other pages. So I don’t think this is a bug, it’s working as designed. I agree we could do a better job handling it.
Something like
if more than 50 words Shall we save that as a draft for you?
(Not my issue because I write and edit in Word - then bring the tidy version to iNat)
I suspect there’s a couple of variations about how you might hit this and what warning is seen. I don’t recall (usually) seeing the “you need to sign in” message when I’ve tried to add an ID or comment to an observation that I’ve had sitting in a tab for ‘too long’, just the “failed to save” bit.
But I do sometimes see that opening a new tab or window to some inat page will force me to sign in again, even when other tabs still have a functioning login - and that one I think is related to browser sandboxing not giving the new tab access to the credentials that already exist in another one.
5 years later this same hassle has just re-ocurred for me the nth time and my frustration level is sky high. No I am not willing to write my comment on a different program (Word or whatever) ! Thanks but I’ll quit commenting and trying to assist /…