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Has anybody else seen the new 'logout' message?

VeselinaPeykova
Active Contributor

It started appearing since yesterday - I assume, that this is part of the new release (there is no information yet in SAP Community Release Notes , I found no blogs from Jerry either, so I have no clue whether this is a part of a bug-fix or intended as an improvement.

I usually try my best to be supportive, when posting feedback, but this new feature is so horrible, that I find it more challenging than usual to keep a civil tone.
1. From a user perspective: why am I seeing this? I opened the page of a question in the evening and left it for a few hours. This is quite normal - I read a few questions after working hours, but sometimes I am too tired or busy to answer immediately and respond early in the morning. What is wrong here? I log on in exactly the same way as always - user/password, I have not installed updates this week, I have not changed drastically the way I use the site (apart from using an external program as comments editor and a draft blog with links for navigation).
In the old forum there were lots of complaints, related to SAP One Support Launchpad session expired time-outs. There were similar complaints from forum members about the 'session expired' in the Activity stream. Don't SAP project team members speak to each other? Session expired messages in websites are despised almost universally - even if there is a good explanation why these occur.

2. The message content: when you design a pop-up, keep the text short and informative. Pop-ups are intended for a few words, not for 'War and Peace'. Luckily, I am using a laptop with decent screen resolution, but on a smaller screen this won't look good.

3. If I have typed something as a response - what happened to this Saving Draft message, which I see sometimes? Even if I got logged out due to inactivity, why a draft cannot be preserved and loaded the next time I log on and open the question link? Is this not the main purpose of saving drafts on server side? This is just one more reason to keep on using Notepad++. I know, there were reports that sometimes a response cannot be posted (the submit button becomes inactive), but this is not a real solution, find a better one, after all you are the experts...

4. One more thing (slightly unrelated to my current feedback/rant): when I typed the question title, I got a peculiar suggestion from the type-ahead:


How is this archived discussion Enhancement of extractors even remotely relevant to what I am asking?

5. Most used tags selection: I find it strange that the site cannot recognize Using SAP.com as an often used tag by me: after all, 14 out of my 15 questions have it as a primary tag.

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

sebastian_wolf
Active Participant

Hi Veselina,

Jürgen already referenced my technical explanation - here's the direct link: http://answers.sap.com/comments/123088/view.html So to keep it short, it's a workaround, not a feature and we simply needed to implement it to prevent data loss. I'm far from being proud of it, but as our platform sometimes has these issues with session/CSRF token management which won't be solved before the next major upgrade (which we will deploy as soon as the vendor releases it) we needed to find a way to deal with it.

Moreover, the popup is not designed by us, we simply send an alert using the browser's own capabilities. So the popup will look differently if used on a mobile browser - and the text should still be short enough to fit on a today's mobile device's screen. However, if you have a shorter alternative which contains all the necessary information (and if possible the apology as well), I'll change it...

And then some additional information concerning the draft handling: It is stored locally in the browser's own storage (for technical details see e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/Window/localStorage ) and not on the server. Moreover, it's overwritten as soon as you start to ask/answer another question. Though I'd love to have a server-based solution, this one also comes with the complete package - as the session handling and we will find a solution here as well. But there's no ETA for the drafts yet.

So we're with you and we also feel the pain as we're using the platform as well. Please trust me that we're doing our best to solve the issues.

Thanks and best regards, Sebastian

VeselinaPeykova
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Thank you, Sebastian. I was not following the discussion, to which Jürgen referred, so I missed your reply there.
I don't know why I assumed that the new platform came with a server-based solution for drafts... my bad 🙂
I am glad that this is not considered as a new feature, but a way for the SAP team to find a workaround to a more serious problem. Do you need help from the forum members in this? Like examples, browser/add-on/OS combinations, number of open tags, time of inactivity/about:config settings etc., which need to be looked into? Now you are looking at the cases, where this popup appears, is this correct?
Reading your explanation, in my case, the reason is most likely a combination of the factors, which you listed: privacy-related add-ons, private browsing mode with not accepting third-party cookies, script blocker, inactivity, multiple tabs open... If you need this to be looked in more details, I can try some combinations of settings/add-ons and see if the popup will appear less or more frequently.
As to the popup text: I find the first and third sentence more than sufficient to provide instructions. If you are trying to collect data (if not all can be collected automatically), probably, instead of apologies (which don't work well with annoyed people), it would be more efficient to point the users to a place where they can publish examples of setups.

sebastian_wolf
Active Participant

Yes, we're currently looking at the cases when exactly this happens. Up to now we weren't able to infer a clearly reproducible step-by-step description from the reports which we've got so far. For me personally I can only say that I had the popup once - virtually out of nowhere and of course it wasn't reproducible even when I just closed the tab, opened a new one and did exactly the same which I did before... I only have a certain assumption, but I couldn't prove it so far. So in case you or anybody else who's reading this can help us in this root cause analysis is greatly appreciated!

Mhmm, concerning the superfluous sentences in the popup, you're maybe right. I simply want to make it crystal clear that the user shouldn't try to post anything. However, collecting data could be a little more complicated effort than it seems at the first glance. We don't only need to store them somehow in line with our data privacy agreement and regulations but also keep all constraints in mind when we analyze them. This can be quite cumbersome in the EU... From my point of view we need to concentrate on the implementation of things that really makes your life on the new Community easier and more efficient - especially if we will need to live with this workaround only for another quarter maximum (most certainly less) from now.

jcgood25
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

I am in the middle of the exact same situation with IE 11

sebastian_wolf
Active Participant

Thanks for showing me the details! Seems that we're actually having a small caching issue with the workaround which affects IE11 and causes the popup to appear again and again even if you've reloaded the page and everything is fine again.

The caching fix will be part of the next deployment. However, the workaround itself is still needed as there are still these session/CSRF attack detection issues.

VeselinaPeykova
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

I don't know if my observation can help you much, but I noticed that this message appears in the case of longer inactivity (during the day I use a different browser, because I need a separate one for SAP notes search with my S-user), when you don't have Activity stream open. In many cases a refresh is triggered by the 'session expired' popup in Activity stream - then you don't see the new popup. Maybe, if you can deactivate temporarily the refresh in Activity stream in a test environment, you can get the message to appear more frequently (my understanding is that the difficulty to reproduce the case is one of the reasons why the problem is tricky to solve).

Currently I am using Pale Moon 27.0.1, Windows, 32-bit version (it also appeared with 27.0.3), private browsing mode, no third-party cookies accepted, NoScript (white-listed sap.com), Ublock Origin (Easy List+ Bulgarian list, the rest of the 3-rd party filters is what you get by default), User Agent Mode: Gecko Compatibility. As to the rest of the non-SAP.com tabs, which I have left open, I don't think that they had much to do with the case.

Answers (4)

Answers (4)

moshenaveh
Community Manager
Community Manager
0 Kudos

Thanks a lot Veselina for your input and detailed report. I will continue to work with IT to improve this experience. We will also investigate why you got an irrelevant proposal for your question.

moshenaveh
Community Manager
Community Manager
0 Kudos

Thanks a lot Veselina for your input and detailed report. I will continue to work with IT to improve this experience. We will also investigate why you got an irrelevant proposal for your question.

Johan_H
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

To your point 4: Please have a look at (and please vote for) this idea on Idea Place.

VeselinaPeykova
Active Contributor

I voted up, thank you for pointing it out. I admit, I stopped checking ideas after I started to get disillusioned, that I will see any of the nice suggestions there being implemented in the foreseeable future.

JL23
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

see Sebastians answers from yesterday in my question https://answers.sap.com/questions/69559/index.html

to 5: it is a known bug, currently you only get the tags you are following