How to extend login session without affecting "Who's Online" list

[mark.hs]

Our users are constantly complaining that they need to login to the forum everyday. Other forums in our industry are still running VB4 and somehow those forums allow people to stay logged in for days on end, without any issue. I know we can go to Settings > Cookies and HTTP Header Options > Session Timeout and change it to something huge like 1,000,000, but if we do this the Who's Online section basically shows thousands of people online because it doesn't remove people from the Online list until their session expires. Also important to note, we do ask users to check the box "Remember Me", but that doesn't seem to function, the user still needs to login once the session expires even if they checked that box. Because people will ask - Cookie prefixes match in the config files, adblockers are disabled, javascript blockers do not exist, cache/cookies have not been cleared, etc.

So our question:
Is there a way to keep users logged in for an extended period of time (say 30 days) , while at the same time having the Who's Online list show people who were online in the last 2 hours (or some shorter period of time)?

Mark

[Wayne Luke]

The only way is the Remember Me box. The Cookie Timeout really shouldn't be set to longer than an hour. It can create adverse affects elsewhere to have it set to 1,000,000 seconds.

You'd have to figure out why the cookies are being deleted off their computer. When they get logged out, what are the cookies on their machine. When they log back in, what is the expiration for the cookies?