Hi, recently (in the past week or so?) there was a site update to Epic Pro Support which has now resulted in my logged in session being forcibly logged out every night. While it’s an inconvenience to have to log in again every morning, the bigger problem is that any responses I had begun to fill out will be completely lost since the log out redirect doesn’t allow the browser to save input text and there’s no way to save responses/questions as draft. This is particularly frustrating since it can often take a while to be ready to submit something you started typing up (for one reason or another) and generally simply a waste of developer time having to redo accidentally lost work if one didn’t have the foresight to save their incomplete response on their local PC. It also seems to redirect in-place which results in the browser not having history of the page it was on prior to the redirect, meaning that if you had several EPS tabs open to research previously reported issues you would be unable to simply press the browser’s back button to return to the pages after logging in.
Is this change to EPS intended or a bug? If it is intended, I would suggest you reconsider due to the aforementioned workflow issues I described. If it is a bug, is there any information I can provide that would be beneficial in resolving this issue? We have definitely observed it occurring in Chrome 136.0.7103.114 on Windows.
It doesn’t look like there were any recent changes to the logout behavior for EPS. There is a possibility this is linked to the login behavior for Epic accounts more broadly, but we need to do some additional checks.
Just to make sure we’re understanding everything correctly, can you let us know what the behavior was like before the changes? How long you stayed signed in? What you were doing prior to the logout (were you actively working or was the page left idle)? When you get logged out, is it immediately when you open the page or when you try to perform any action like posting a question or clicking a link?
I confirm that I have the same problem. I’ve logged yesterday and I had to login again to open that page today. I’ve never logged out as well. I’m on Brave so I don’t know if it’s specific to that browser.
Sure. Prior to the change, it was possible to stay logged in for at least a couple weeks (I’d usually leave open one or more relevant EPS tabs to reference when tracking down bugs which rarely was quick) and you’d only be notified that you were logged out when you navigated to another page (the open page would never change by itself). It was always long enough that I never navigated to a page by submitting a comment/asking a question to discover it had logged me out, only really when I refreshed one of those reference tabs. I don’t think there’s ever been a time I was logged out while I was actively typing something up, just overnight when I’m not working.
Thanks. I got confirmation that there were no changes to the login timeout behavior for the EPS community platform and appears to be working as intended. There has been a 24-hour session limit that has been in place for quite some time. Prior behavior where you could stay signed in for several weeks at a time seems like it may have been a bug. The changes seem to be linked to changes to the way Epic account authentication work, which goes beyond EPS.
That said, we did look into seeing if we could make sign-in sessions longer for EPS to improve usability, but this was decided against for security concerns with possible threats from having extended sessions without reauthentication.
I’ll see if there’s anything we can do to improve or at least reduce the friction around this.
While having to re-authenticate every 24 hours is inconvenient, I can understand the desire from a security standpoint and would be fine with that limitation if it was possible to A) redirect back to the page you had open upon logging in and B) save in-progress comments/questions automatically. I think that having both of those changes implemented would address my workflow issues.
Thanks. I’ve submitted requests for both of those changes to be evaluated and implemented.
I don’t know if saving in-progress drafts of questions or comments is something the platform could support right now, so I expect that to take some time. I’ve asked for priority on the redirects after logging in, since I expect that to be much simpler.
Unfortunately, when a session expires and you’re asked to reauthenticate, EPS loses track of the page you were on prior to the session expiration, so redirecting back to the page you were on before the session expired isn’t possible. Your browser should however still have that page stored, so after signing in, you should be able to go back to where you were.
We still need to look into save in-progress, but I don’t expect this to be for a while.
Interesting, now the browser does seem to be allowing me to go back to the page I was on before session expiry as you mentioned, so that’s good at least. I was stuck in a login redirect loop going back when I originally posted, maybe that was some weird one-off situation or there’s some other condition that has to also be true for that to occur.