System time-out notification

System time-out notification

by Ericka E. -
Number of replies: 3

Does anybody know of a reliable plugin or way to create a notification in Moodle that will alert users after being idle for a period of time?  I'm thinking of something similar to when you are logged into, for example, your bank account or credit card account and after being idle on the page for ~15 minutes a message pops up asking "are you still here?"  We have a system time-out after an hour of being idle, but many of our students are running into problems when typing lengthy discussion forum posts.  They will spend a significant amount of time putting their post together, click the post to forum button, and then are told they can't post to the forum because they are no longer logged in and all of the work they did is lost.


We harp on our faculty here regularly to tell their students of this issue and to encourage them to create posts in a word processor then paste them into the forum, but it never fails that a large number of students still lose their work because of a system auto log-off.

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In reply to Ericka E.

Re: System time-out notification

by ben reynolds -

This was resolved in Moodle version about 2.8 or so. The Atto editor auto saves work after about 30 seconds. So, the auto logout should not affect whether text is saved. And returning to the text box after logging in should restore it.

Of course, the auto save settings need to be set smile

https://www.moodlenews.com/2014/automatic-saving-in-moodle-text-editors-try-it-out/

Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to ben reynolds

Re: System time-out notification

by Ericka E. -

This is great news that I overlooked!  I've just now got my team on board to use the Atto editor as default instead of TinyMCE, so this auto-save setting will be perfect.  Thank you so much, Ben!

In reply to Ericka E.

Re: System time-out notification

by ben reynolds -

Off topic:
If you're where I think you are and you were there for the Moot about 2009, we probably met. Clark is now living several blocks from my office but we haven't managed to run into each other yet.
In any case, glad to have helped. We had the same situation with our students, and it was driving us nuts!