Can we get a warning if we get booted off during a session?

Question

After several other edits I was trying to create a profile for the spouse of Anton Kumpfmüller which took a while trying to get all the sources together. When trying to save the profile I got an error message "Invalid Person". Unfortunately, the help page does not explain what an "invalid person" is or what would need to be corrected to make an "invalid" person valid. Only after I started to ask a question about this here and wanted to post it did I realize that I did get booted off during the time I was collecting sources. A simple message like "Your session has ended, please sign in again" could save a lot of time trying to figure out what one might have done wrong!

Answer 1

When you login, make sure you tick the checkbox to "remember your login" (or whatever it says). That way your session will last longer.

Otherwise, there's no way to generate a warning, because these webpages are static, not dynamic. (static means, there is no communication between the site and your device; dynamic means the page periodically refreshes itself to check you status)

Comments

I always edit with "Remember your login" checked, and I've also experienced situations where I got logged off during an edit. This happened because it was 30 days (or however long a remembered login lasts) since the last time I had logged in from that computer, and the remembered login happened to expire while I was editing!

Fortunately, my browser usually retains a copy of my unsaved work, so I've not lost significant effort. However, some of the error messages I get when my login has expired don't explain what happened (like the "Invalid Person" message that Helmut received), so I can easily imagine doing something by mistake that would cause me to lose my contribution.

Answer 2

Sorry that you lost your work. This is why I save my changes incrementally.

Comments

Yes, either work offline and copy/paste it all in one fell swoop or, when working online, save often. Learned this lesson long ago when my only connection was a dial-up and I frequently got dropped when working online.

Answer 3

I have had the same thing happen with a merge, as I was doing the merge and cleaning up the biography, I noticed some sources missing, went to look for them, spent less than 5 minutes, but after all the edits, I hit save, it went to another page and I got a session timed out message.   The problem is that during a merge you cannot do an incremental save.   So, I guess in the future I will just back out of the merge and then do the research.   One of those "would you like to continue" messages would help.

Comments

When you get the time out bar at the top, double tap the midway save bar. Most times the save will go through.

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If you get the error during a merge and frequently other pages where you were taking time to complete before saving it, hit your back browser button and you should see the page that you were on, still filled in completely, hit the save or merge button, whatever is appropriate and it will then complete.

Answer 4

Usually, you should get the message "It looks like your login session has expired or otherwise been lost, so your data cannot be saved. Please Sign In in a new window first, then come back and try to save again.", but it doesn't look like it's triggering on the add spouse form.

Answer 5

You could use a password manager such as Avast Password Manager or Dashlane to handle logins for you. I was getting booted off this and Familysearch way too often and I've not had a problem since I started using a program to handle logins.