...whats time out,? can i adjust it or better still turn it off.
Timeout is a sort of security feature. I say "sort of" because there really isn't much security in the average forum so you wouldn't want to use it to send credit card numbers for example, even by private message.
The reason most forum and similar sites have a timeout is that you can't rely on the Internet. For example you might be editing a post, and your computer might suddenly catch fire, or the guy in the road outside might go through your service cables with his digger. There's no way for the forum software to know what's happened, nor if it will ever hear from you again, and no way to know if you'll even be using the same computer if it does -- let alone whether your computer will have had a chance to store safely somewhere the most recent information that the site had sent to it.
So to avoid a whole slew of issues that can't really be solved, the forum software will pick a number of seconds, say 2000 or something like that. After you log in it counts the time between the pages that it sends to you (it sends a page every time you click on one of the links in a page and you see your screen redrawn). Obviously it has to maintain a counter for each person logged in, but that's child's play for a computer. If you don't click any links and so it doesn't send a page to you for that length of time it considers the login session to have expired. Anything temporary that you were working on is usually discarded. The next time you want to use your forum account, you will have to log in again. If it's three seconds or three months later, the server doesn't care.
Some sites let you decide how long the timeout is. I think the old version of Bushcraftuk.com did but I can't remember if I've seen anywhere in the new site that will let you change it -- I had a quick look, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it so I may just have missed it.
One way to avoid being timed out is to use the "preview post" button frequently while you're editing. That way the forum software will (er, should!) reset your counter each time you ask to see the page as it is so far. Unfortunately it's easy to forget to do it and then you'll be cursing. But you know that already.
Another way of avoiding the issue is to create a document 'offline' and only log in to send it. That means you won't spend hours on something without letting the forum software know you're still around. It's getting a little bit technical but I assure you that if you can write a post for this forum which contains images then you can create a document offline and send it.
Note that while you're typing the words into your post, no characters are being sent to the forum server, so it doesn't know you're still there. That's just the way HTTP works. Most of the time the browser on your computer is pretty much the only thing that's involved until you click on a link, which says to the browser "send some stuff to the server". If you send stuff to a different server, such as photobucket etc., the forum server will know nothing about it so it's no help with this problem.
That was a horribly oversimplified version of what's really going on but it's close enough to help you avoid the problem.
ready for you to press post again.
