[Sigia-l] time-out session lengths, security, and user tasks

[Listera]

"Joe Sokohl" wrote:

> The same goes for hardware/software concerns. How much is too much? What are
> the numbers? How much bandwidth and space does a session take? What are the
> chances that all users will keep sessions going forever? Once again, it's a
> clash of the possible against the likely.

All this pent-up anger against the techies :-)

As your well-placed questions underline, there are no easy, quick,
infallible "rules" or "magic" numbers a la Nielsen. As I keep saying,
there's no substitute for thinking through a *specific* problem and coming
up with a solution *in context*. That can only be done by practitioners who
can balance the resource/usability requirements. This (spec'ing, profiling,
testing, etc), unfortunately, takes time, money and staff. People don't want
to spend that and it's admittedly much easier to grope for an "industry
standard rule".

In this case the spectrum is pretty wide: you can pull an arbitrary number
out of thin air and kill all sessions accordingly or personalize each
session length to each user's site-usage statistics dynamically. The answer
is probably somewhere in between, given a desire to be user-friendly and
having limited resources.

Best,

Ziya