Hi,
repeatedly it bit me: Liferay has this - usually nice - feature that warns you about soon to be expiring (or already expired) sessions. The problem with this feature is, that it's completely client based and forces logout after a timer has expired (with a warning offering to extend the session). Now that there's the chat portlet a session would be open (actually with the chat portlet I'd like to have a session open for longer) indefinitely - e.g. as long as a page was displayed.
Additional problems come with tabbed browsing: I happen to read the forum in multiple tabs - searching for information or following links to other messages, keeping the message board index open in a separate tab etc.
Now one "old" tab is enough to terminate my session, probably taking my last message board post with it.
I believe to have seen a solution to disabling this feature serverside - only I can't do that on www.liferay.com where it bites me quite often. For these selfish reasons, I'd like to see this topic addressed - only I have not decided what to suggest:

• keep the counter client-side, but instead of logging out after 30 minutes it should check if other counters are currently operating (e.g. once every minute) and re-adjust itself to the longest running counter
• provide an option for the user to disable the feature (would be valuable on www.liferay.com) in the personal settings
• remove explicit "logout" from client side timer event and display "Your session might have expired..."
• other solutions?

Thanks for your attention (or suggestion),
Olaf

Its nailed me rather often too. It seems to be more of an Opera & Firefox issue though. It maintains the session ID in IE through the tabs. Not sure how to fix it, but that definitely seems to be the problem.

In the stack of RFE priorities, where does this one sit? Session timeouts on this PORTAL (not my local install) is starting to increasingly bugging me.

Is there a Liferay RFE list available to the community?

Well, this hint does not solve the problem, but maybe it could mitigate it.

Please compare the message from Liferay ...
"Warning! Due to inactivity, your session has expired. Please save any data you may have entered before refreshing the page."

... with the similar one from Google Doc:
"You have been disconnected. Please access to your account from another window."
(... more or less: here it's translated from Italian)

While Google suggests the easiest way to solve the problem, Liferay just declare the risk, creating fear and inconvenience.
IMHO, I would suggest to follow the google example.

In addition, the liferay 'expired' message covers the top bar, hiding the name of the current user.
In case you change user often (e.g. you are administrator), you have to peek in the html source, near the 'user-fullname' stylename, to discover who you are.
So, it would help to report in the message both the current user name and a confortable <href="..portal home.." target="_blank">.

Andrea

(sorry to renew an old thread - maybe it is against the rule, isn't?)

good point regarding the message. You can contribute this as a translation (it doesn't change any code, just provides a "better" translation) on http://translate.liferay.com (use your screen-name with the liferay.com password. Alternatively you could file an improvement ticket on https://issues.liferay.com/ - preferred as this could update all languages with the friendlier message, especially if this issue would change the translation key.

Please note, that the new session-timeout implementation in 6.1 is a lot better than the one I described back in 2009 - now any active window extends the session and no longer does a background-tab end the session that you're working in the foreground.