Keeping forum users logged in

[emrys404]

Hello, i built a forum from scratch but i'm having problems keeping the users logged in. My forum lends itself to typing out long and indepth posts but i find this usually expires the sessions before they hit submit. I dont think simply extending the expiration of sessions is the answer. How do professional forums handle this?

Thanks
-emrys

[Weedpacket]

Well, PHP's default is already 24 minutes (why 24? I dunno) and there's only a 1/100 chance that the session will expire on any given PHP request after that, so these must be pretty long posts to not be done offline and pasted in, but....

Consider offering an automatic login (like this board does): store a cookie that contains the user's login details. If the user's session has expired while they were writing, the cookie that gets sent with their requests will log them back in, start a new session to replace the old one, and continue as normal. Of course, anything in the session that has expired has been lost.