This is a followup to an older post of mine about notifying & prompting your users for action once they’ve become idle. I’ve since re-written and abstracted the logic, creating a much more useful & customizable plugin. The main issue with my first implementation, which I’ve addressed in this update, is that the server was never actually polled to maintain an active server-side session during long periods of use. The server-side session might be set to expire after 30 minutes, but a user could be active on your application without a page load for longer than that. As such, following a page load after 30 minutes, the user would (presumably) be prompted to log back in… not a great user experience.

The gist of here is that after a user is idle after a configurable period of time, a div/UI dialog/whatever opens, warning the user that his/her session is about to expire. The user has X number of seconds to click a “resume” link in order to continue their session. If this event is not fired, the user is relocated (configurable) to a page where you’d likely implement server-side code to end their session. Idle state is one without any mouse movement or keypresses, and is detected with Paul Irish’s idleTimer plugin. (more…)