Post timeout countdown display

New Feature Request

Hi, one of the most common complaints from our users is that they spend time writing long journal entries only to have the work lost when they try to post - reason is that they've exceeded the inactive timeout period, in our case 70 minutes. I've spent a couple of years trying to get them to adopt a best practice of 'short but often', and the dashboard of our site specifically states in large bold letters to save journal entries within an hour or you will lose the work. Unfortunately they are used to MS Word with autosave feature and many users don't get the difference between that and a web based resource.

Would it be possible to add a small widget/block to the interface with a 'countdown' clock that pulls it's base value from the site timeout setting, and resets whenever the user clicks a button, etc to let Mahara know they are still active? This could be made even more obvious if the block flashed or turned red within 5 minutes of timing out to remind the user to save their work immediately.

An alternative - though perhaps more draconian - solution might be to auto-force a 'save as draft' of the current post if the user is within 1 minute of timing out.

Regards, Gordon.