Big Boards ||| Time-Out for Cookie
 

Quick background for my board. We have been running strong for 2.5 years. We have 1.1 million posts, 10,560 members ... very active group. Usually 300-600 people always on. 800 people max. I keep my time out to be the standard 15 minutes.

Here is where my confusion lies. I have other boards that compete with mine and try to make theirs look bigger. Well a quick glance at "who is online" and the last active time shows that some people have not been online for over an hour!!!!

Now I know these copycat boards have no where near the volume, but it is frusturating because I do not think it is really all that fair to represent my own board in that same fashion. If I did that it would show thousands of people online.

I guess what I am wondering is how many of these boards that seem so huge fudge the time-out to keep that perception.

Most I would think. I know another forum that is a similar subject to ours (some would say it's a rival) that has set it's cookie timeout to about six hours to make themselves look busy.

i have mine set to 25minutes.

But only because a couple people would play a game in the arcade for 15+ minutes at a time, and their score wouldnt submit correctly.

30 minutes here, because it was a wish by some users to have it that long

I had my main board with a timeout of 6 minutes lol. Now its 25 minutes.

I have the same problem as Paul M, some other competitor website has their timeout set to 24hours! And the worse of all, is that they go with that stats to advertisers...

wont raising cookie timeout raise server load drastically?

No, how do you figure it would?

OH, I just thought it might tax the CPU more. so it's not true?

No, sessions are just left in the session table longer.

I have always had 30 minutes, and again arcades use if the main reason for this, it also seems an 'ideal time' to me.

But as others have said, I have seen several boards claiming to be "rivals" (including one UK ISP!) who seem to have extremely long timeouts set, not seen 24 hours but I have seen 2 hours. Which seems silly.

Haha! I have just checked that site and you're spot on! It says 51 members, I clicked on five names at 10.15am UK time and all three were last online at 7am!

Desperation or what?

Our boards everytime default (15min).

I have default 900 seconds

60 minutes here by community request.

30 minutes on mine, per user request...

slow day too, only 273 registered/122 guests online...must be the weather ;)

lol check out rpgbugs.com its like 24 hours...

60 minutes

is it not a security risk to leave cookie sessions hanging around for many hours?

Same, 30 minutes...

No, but it is misrepresenting your activity. 15-30 minutes is optimal.

45 minutes and 60 minutes.

this is the setting in the php.ini file?

No, you can find it in the options in the admincp

now i know that before i should of not messed with the php.ini set time line thingy.
anyways that was only a test
mine is now set to 2700*45min* and its done the right way:D finaly

10 minutes. Since I have no games on my sites, nor are the pages so long that it takes 10 minutes to reading it, there is no reason to make it longer.

Unless your users write posts for 30-40 minutes and then +++++ when they lose their posts....not to mention arcade users. Not everyone is doing it to make them look bigger than they are.

Tell them to use that remember me checkbox, I've played in the arcade for hours with no adverse effects.

Been there, done that. For some reason it doesn't work for a lot of my members. That's why I had to increase to 30 minutes. I think that is where I am at now. I forget. On my small paid subscription board it is like 10 minutes.

Because they are lieing to you mostly, have remember me checked by default and 99% of that isssue should go away.