Writing long posts in SharePoint? Beware of TimeOut

If you're writing longer texts into Windows SharePoint Services lists be careful. By default WSS has a 30-minute security timeout. This means that if you'll click on a New Item and then write in the contents for 30 minutes and 1 second, you'll get an error message when clicking Save and close. If you click back, usually the long text you entered will be lost!

There are 2 ways to avoid this. One is if you're a server administrator:

1. In Start Menu click Administrative tools and SharePoint Central Administration.
2. Click Configure virtual server settings and select the site you want to configure security timeout for.
3. Under Virtual Server Management click Virtual server general settings.
4. In the section Web Page Security Validation you can edit or turn off the timeout settings.

!!!! Warning !!!! - With this you're increasing the security risk of the WSS website so be sure that if you're going to increase the timeout or turn it off, that you know what you're doing.

Other - simpler - client way

There is another way though and it's done by the editor:

Before hitting Save and Close - copy the long text you've written into the field, into the clipboard, then refresh the page and paste the long text back. Now you can safely click Save and Close.

Too bad this way you can only save the contents of one field, though...