Question

To deal with people spacing out or getting distracted while the have the page locked, how about...

• When there is no editing activity (a save or preview) for a settable time, a medium number of minutes, the user gets a warning that they are in danger of timing out
• After another time, a small number of minutes, theya re timed out, but...
• Their editing work is saved, and next time they return to edit the page (within a reasonable period), they can recall it and continue editing where they left off
• That autosave would be a nice non-auto option for the user: suspend my edit, save my work, and unlock the page
• On a page with this option in effect (chosen by the author) there could be a "I'm still here" button that does nothing but reset the time-out timer.
• Using the automagic page update feature, we could even display the time out counter every couple fo minutes.

I realize this probably requires a bunch of whole new mechanisms, like timing user activity, automatic action by the server, keeping user's stuff in private areas, etc. But maybe it's soemthing to think about. It would help in situations where you wanted fairly intensive editing of a page by multiple users (see NuancedLocking).

-- DavidJLewis - 06 Mar 2004

Environment

-- DavidJLewis - 06 Mar 2004

Answer

This sounds interesting, you might want to move it to the Codev web and make it a FeatureBrainstorming topic. This would probably be best implemented as a plugin unless you can interest anyone in the CoreTeam in it.

-- SamHasler - 09 Mar 2004

what about not locking the topic: (allowing an other person B to edit too ) but at save time check if the topic has been modified by somebody else? if so: return the new version (*B*'s version) + *A*'s version. if not: save the modifications ( ie: lock + save + unlock in 1 transaction).

-- MarcelTrap - Apr - 2004

As Sam pointed out, this discussion is best done in the Codev web.

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Jun 2004