Remember Me

The remember me checkbox on the login panel is there to help you if you login frequently to the website from your own computer.

It helps by setting a cookie (a small piece of encrypted information) on your PC and when you next visit the site, it checks to see if the cookie is there and if so, logs you in automatically. Do not check the box if you are on a public computer or any computer that you are not in sole control of otherwise anyone visiting the site from that computer after you will automatically be logged in using your credentials.

When the cookie is saved to your PC, it is set with an expiration date of 30 days from the time you login and if you login again within 30 days, it resets it for a futher 30 days; There are 3 reasons why this might not work;

1. Cookies are not enabled in your browser - if you can login, then they are so don't worry.
2. You have emptied/cleared out, your browsers cache. Cache, in this case, is an area of your hard drive that contains information about your recent browsing history, cookies, downloaded file and other things. If you have had cause to empty/clear out the cache then the cookie will have been destroyed and will no longer be available to automatically log you in.
3. You last visited over 30 days ago and the cookie has expired.

Session Expiriation

When a browser visits a website, the server hosting the website creates an area of memory known as session state that holds specific information, among other things, pertaining to the current page the user is on, such as values of textboxes etc.

The session last for 20 minutes from the last time the browser changed pages or posted-back to the website.

If the user visits the website and leaves the browser open without doing anything further, the session will expire after 20 minutes. This is to preserve system resources on the server and prevent it eventually running out of memory. When the user next changes a page or does something to cause a post-back, such as submitting a form, the session is recreated and available for the next 20 minutes.

If the user is merely viewing the webpage, there is no problem with this session being destroyed and recreated as needed because we are only viewing information. However, if you are logged in and performing administrative functions or any form of data entry and the session expires (you will be notified via a pop up dialog box), then before you post back any vlaues to the server you must copy them to a plain text editor such as notepad, refresh the browser windon and then paste the values back before saving the page. If you do not save, refresh and paste, then on postback all the values you have entered will be lost and almost certainly cause an error condition to occur and you will need to start again from scratch.