How to avoid giving offense to a user

[James Klock]

Our Internet workstation policy limits patrons to 30 minute sessions.  I'm
just now putting the finishing touches on a system which gets launched
every half hour, on the half hour, and quits Netscape (thus closing all the
windows), as well as destroying the cache, history, cookies, bookmarks,
security, mail and news files.  

I know the original poster was using Win3.1x (soon to become Win95).  If
others are interested, we're using Macs for our Internet workstations, so
it was fairly simple to write an AppleScript that quits Netscape and
trashes the user-modifiable files.  We're using Chris Johnson's shareware
cron 1.0a7 to launch that AppleScript application at pre-specified intervals.

For you Windows fans, Bardon Data System's WinU claims the ability to quit
applications at specified times, or after a prespecified amount of time (x
minutes after launch).  I haven't played with those features, so I can't
speak to their efficacy, but I'm generally impressed with WinU.  
Bardon does not, and probably won't ever, have a Windows 3.1x version of
WinU.  Plan on implementing it after the upgrade.

If you're adamant about not kicking active users off, you need to look for
something that will close Netscape after a given amount of idle time (much
like a screen saver, but it will need to be able to force Netscape to
quit).  In a Mac environment, this is again easy: look for a shareware
program called Start-Thing (it's available from http://www.filemine.com/)
and have it run an AppleScript like I described above (I'll be happy to
provide mine if anyone wants it-- you'd almost certainly want to tweak it
for your use, but it's a decent starting point).  In a Windows environment,
this should still be possible, but I haven't gone looking for
screen-saver-like tools for Windows.

At 09:25 AM 3/13/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Patron pops up 2nd (or 3rd or 4th or 5th) Netscape window to cover up 
>offensive window when others go by station
>Patron finishes session leaving Netscape at library home page rather 
>than closing Netscape out altogether.
>Next patron sits down to discover multiple offensive open...windows
>Anyone have suggestions as to how to easily clear all those 
>multiple sessions between users?