By CC Group on Friday, 22 January 2016
Posted in General Issues
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My main question is: can I increase or remove the timeout for creating a blog post?

I have verified an issue on my production, test, and StackIdeas Demo sites.

If you create a new blog post, after a certain amount of idle time the post will be unable to publish or save as draft. When the issue happens, after trying to save the post status returns "JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data". In my tests, I begin to see the timeout error after waiting 20 minutes.

Here's why this is a problem for my site: I have a lot of users who will make posts and do research at the same time, usually in another browser tab. It frequently takes them longer than 20 minutes to compose their blog post. It gets frustrating to them because the composer keeps working and letting them build the post even past 20 minutes, but then they lose all of their work because it will not save or publish.
Now, sometimes I can recover it using the backend and finding an entry under Posts -> Drafts labeled "Initial Post (Revision #1)", but I still lose a lot of content from the timeout.

To recreate this issue: Create a blog post, choose any template, enter a title and some text in the body, and then just open a new browser tab and leave the post tab alone for 20 minutes. Come back after 20 minutes and try to save or publish the post, you should get the error "JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data" or similar.

Thank you for any help you can provide!

P.S. My production site is run as an internal-only intranet for a company, so I cannot easily provide access. As I mentioned above, I can recreate this error on your demo site, so you shouldn't need access to my site in order to troubleshoot, and I should be able to apply any fixes to my site myself. If you do need access to my site, I can make some configuration changes and allow it, but will take 24-48 business hours (M-F).

P.P.S. For the same reason that my site is hosted internal-only, I have not assigned a domain to my products and I hope this is not an issue.
Hey there,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply,

Can you try set this Joomla Session Lifetime to 99 and see how it goes? Because I've tried to set this Session Lifetime to 5 minute, after 5 minute, I can't able to save blog post because it auto logged me out.
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Tuesday, 26 January 2016 20:03
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Hey there,

I am sorry for the delay of this reply, I was a little occupied with the development of EasyDiscuss earlier today. Hm, we actually taken care of this issue by performing "automated pings" to the server when the composer is rendered.

Go to Settings > Composer and there is a section called "Keep Session Alive" . Turn this on and set it to 30 seconds (It should be lower than your timeout value in Joomla's global configuration)
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Friday, 22 January 2016 22:27
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Thanks for that information. I have already set the Keep Session Alive to 30 seconds, and I even once set it to 5 seconds just to test. The session always times out and I see the JSON error when trying to save or publish.

It seems that the key for my issue maybe that the tab is inactive for so long, as in, the user is working in another browser tab for about 20 minutes before returning to the composer tab. Does the Keep Alive ping work in an inactive browser tab?

I use the FireFox browser, latest version 43.0.4.
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Friday, 22 January 2016 22:57
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Hey there,

Yes, when that option is enabled, it just sends a dummy ping via ajax to the site to tell Joomla that you are alive
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Friday, 22 January 2016 23:12
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Hm, well I do have that enabled and I have set it to 30 seconds or less and I've still seen the problem. To clarify, it does not log me out, it just fails to publish or save the post. I can close the composer and still browse the site normally, or even start another blog post.

As I said before, I recreated this error on your demo site, so I'm not sure what the problem is but it's not just on my site. I put the steps to recreate the error in my first post, did you try it? I know it's kind of long to wait 20 minutes, but if you try it I think you will see the error.
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Friday, 22 January 2016 23:25
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Okay, let me test this locally. When you said opening a new tab, do you mean you left the EasyBlog tab and browse other sites using other tabs?

P/S: Our demo site get's reset every 15 minutes, so I am not too sure if you are hitting this on our demo site because of this or the resetting is causing this.
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Friday, 22 January 2016 23:29
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Yes, I leave the EasyBlog tab and browse other sites (like for doing research).

Thanks for the clarification about the demo site, and thank your for taking the time to try this issue.

By the way, good luck on the EasyDiscuss development. I have all of your products and enjoy seeing the new features and fixes as your team continues to make progress.
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Saturday, 23 January 2016 00:39
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Arlex & Mark,

Sorry for the long delay. If I set the Joomla session to 90, this seems to be solving the problem.

Thanks for taking a look at this with me. I think you are right, this seems to be dependent on the Joomla session setting. I was being distracted from looking at that because for some reason it is not actually logging me out of Joomla, but that is another issue to explore.

Thank you!! Good luck with the upcoming changes and I look forward to seeing what you create.
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Wednesday, 03 February 2016 23:40
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You are most welcome
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Wednesday, 03 February 2016 23:44
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