I am a newbee with DNN and IIS, so forgive me if this is total common knowledge elsewhere ...

How do I increase the session time-out for my DNN portal? I have noticed that when writing Text/HTML entries for more than a certain time, the session to the portal is lost, and the content entered is also lost becuase there is no valid user session. This is very annoying, because it means that a lot of work writing content is lost (if not copied to notepad/wordpad before posting, which seems a little stupid). I can live with it because I understand what a session time-out is, but many of my external content providers will not understand why their 30 minutes of writing HTML content is thrown out the windows. And Forum users writing long posts (the site is somewhat related to political issues so very long posts are expected) will also be in danger of loosing their entire post if the session time-out is exceeded.

Any tips?

I am using Windows 2003 Server, IIS 6, and DotNetNuke 4.4.0
Thanks,

- Jesper

Try increasing the Forms auth timeout value in web.config

Also make sure that they choose "remember me" if they want to make sure their session does not timeout when idle.

Thanks, I'll try changing the setting in web.config.

The "remember me" setting does not seem to affect the problem. I have it enabled myself, but the contents of by submitted form still gets lost when I am routed through the log-in screen after the time-out.

That setting also affects how long the "remember me" works for. By default it is only an hour in DNN as a security precaution.

As it turned out, the session timeout is affected by a gazillion different settings. The missing link for me was the time-out setting in the IIS manger itself. By default it is 20 minutes, which is waaaaay too low for a CMS based site with external content providers.
So here is what you need to do in order to make sure you dont get problems with content providers working on articles/forum posts for a long time:

• increase session time-out for the webserver
  
  • Open the properties for your DNN site in your IIS manager
  • Go to the tab "Home Directory"
  • Click the button "Configuration" in the lower section of the screen
    (You now have a window named "Application Configuration")
  • Go to the tab "Options"
  • Make sure "Enable session state" is enabled, and increase the value. Personally I prefer 60 minutes.
• Enable content expiration for the webserver (so nobody screws up their data using the back/foreward buttons in their browser)
  
  • Open the properties for your DNN site in your IIS manager
  • Go to the tab "HTTP Headers"
  • Make sure "Enable content expiration" is enabled and set your desired expire-time. Personally I prefer immediate expiration.
• Increase the session time-out for your DNN portal
  • Log in as Host
  • Go to the Host/provider configuratino page
  • Open the "Advanced" section
  • Increase the number of minutes users can be online without interaction
  • Save the setting
• Adjust the forms timeout for .NET web applications on your site
  • Open your web.config file
  • find the forms tag
  • Set the timeout value to whatever you like. The new default value for DNN is 60, but in older files (or sites where someone messed with the value) it might be lower. I prefer timeout="60" which also matches the above.
• Cycle/restart your IIS server

Increasing these values will make your content providers and forum users happier. But please note that it will also reduce your statistical count of unique visitors in some analysis tools. Or perhaps more correctly report the ACTUAL number of unique visitors, since you are going to have less users with dropped sessions and lost data ...

brgds

- Jesper