What I would really like to do, right now, is collect the thousand or so messages that collected in the Buffy thread before I finished my tape last night, and download them into my Palm (which doesn't do HTML) to read on the train. I can skip in Natter, but I really want to read the fresh show talk. Is there a way to do this?

I just got the following error hitting "read new"

It seemed to have problems with line 69 of giles!?!

October 4, 2002, 12:34 pm Sophia Brooks[58]: ERROR [2] Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) line 69 of file /home/buffist/public_html/classes/giles.php October 4, 2002, 12:34 pm Sophia Brooks[58]: ERROR [2] MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) line 69 of file /home/buffist/public_html/classes/giles.php

Received a fatal error when I tried to post. I had begun a post when I needed to run to school and pick up kid. I got back 45 minutes later, finished my thought and hit post. Got error. Went back to thread, finished reading the new messages (2) and posted with no problem. Didn’t think to copy error, but it was the Fatal Error, don’t worry, etc one. This was about 5 minutes ago.

I've had this happen to, also after long delays in actually posting. It seems as if there is an expiration date on the posting box.

I added a link to Natter 2 to the last post in Natter 1.

Hrm, did we ever figure out a way to add a link to the BuffistaCorp cafepress site?

From where?

Don't know how long you spent composing before posting. But if there is no activity, your login expires after 30 minutes. That is not a bug, and not something that can be worked around since it is set at the server level. (Actually it could be worked around by using regular cookies rather than session variable; then you could control the timeout. Since this would basically mean completely rewriting secuity, I doubt there would ever be a reason to do this. This is one of those things that sometimes gets me in trouble. I make a statement, then realize it is not strictly true because of an exception - and point out the exception to just for completenesses sake. )

CaBil, there's one in the header of the BuffistaCorp thread. There might also be one in links. Where else are you thinking of?

The problem with the thread header here is that it only appears on the first page. On TT, the thread header appeared on every page, so when you needed the links in the thread header, they were always right there. Now here, most of the links that used to be in the headers are in the sidebar, but if you have thread specific links, like CafePress, then they get lost. Should we repeat the thread header on every page, as TT did?

Don't know how long you spent composing before posting. But if there is no activity, your login expires after 30 minutes. That is not a bug, and not something that can be worked around since it is set at the server level. (Actually it could be worked around by using regular cookies rather than session variable; then you could control the timeout. Since this would basically mean completely rewriting secuity, I doubt there would ever be a reason to do this. This is one of those things that sometimes gets me in trouble. I make a statement, then realize it is not strictly true because of an exception - and point out the exception to just for completenesses sake. )

The first thing about this is that I don't think most people know that the session expires after a certain amount of time, and that if you try to post after that time, you will get an error. Even if we decide not to do anything about it, we need to advise people to be aware of the problem, and so they won't be surprised when it happens.

The big problem with this feature is that if you're using any browser but Opera, you can't go back and recover whatever was in the posting box. Since one of the conditions most likely to trigger this problem is the composing of a very long post, this is not good. I realize that it may be good practice to compose long posts in a text editor, and then copy them into the posting box, but it's not a very user friendly solution.

I think all you would have to do, in the event the session has expired, is to have the system look for the 'Remember me' cookie on the client computer, and if it's there, start another session. If the cookie isn't there, then offer the login screen to start another session. I don't know how difficult all this would be, but the situation as it stands right now just isn't very satisfactory.