SMF Keepalive function

[DataGhost]

If you don't know what I mean in the poll, you can just vote either option 2 or 3, or cast a blank vote. If you don't want to vote for something you don't know anything about, you should read my post and consider voting again afterwards.

After searching on the forums, I found no ongoing discussion about this feature. For what I've read, it is used to prevent frustrations after a timed-out session when making a large post. Personally, I don't suffer from this problem. I do suffer from another problem, though.

As many people nowadays, I have a tabbed browser. I use the tabbed browsing feature quite a lot, and sometimes I reload a couple of pages at the same time, to check them later. Normal tabs have black text, however, tabs which have just loaded a page have blue text. This is very useful to me, so I can immediately see which of the X tabs I haven't checked yet, after reloading some. Example:
hxxp:home.wxs.nl/~huism011/tabsbig.png [nonactive]

As you can see, 2 tabs currently have blue text. The thing is, I haven't reloaded them! This behaviour is the result of the SMF Keepalive function. Every 20 minutes some request is done in the background, supposedly keeping my session from timing out. In my opinion this is very annoying, because I keep clicking on them, seeing that nothing really changed. Also, when writing posts, I rarely need 20 whole minutes, let alone 60 (which is, I believe, when my session is supposed to time out). Also, I always check the checkbox to keep myself logged in, with a cookie. This way, I'll be logged in with every request. This means I won't really suffer from this 'timeout problem'.

For what I've read, the developer's defense is that people get frustrated when they find out, after writing a big post, that their session timed out. Again, I don't have this problem. When my session ever times out, my post will not be lost. I can just hit the back-button and voila, there is my post again. I can copy it to the clipboard, login again and repost it, or I could login from another tab.

So, I hope I made clear that the reason for the keepalive function is not a valid one for me. It just annoys me. That's why I turned this topic into a poll, to hopefully get a little bit more force behind this. I know that if this 'problem' is 'solved', it won't be until all SMF boards I visit are updated.

Now I'd like to propose two possible solutions to this problem, which may also be combined:

• Enable this feature by default and add an option in the user account settings to change it. This way people who don't know about this should have the board working exactly as the developers intended to, and people who are in any way annoyed by this feature will be able to disable it if they like. This is the most obvious solution in my opinion.
• Whenever a session times out, check the HTTP POST data to see if a user just posted a message. If he did, show the session timeout as usual, but add a textarea with the contents of his post. I have also seen this in use on another forum succesfully, for browsers that don't save the form input, for example.

The first reason is my favorite. I hope this will give you some ideas from another point of view.

[H]

I don't get this problem on FFx so it must be something Opera specific.

If there isn't a good reason for using keepalives on all sessions maybe it could be kept unless you have chosen to stay logged in forever