Losing posts
Forum category
In my thread in the theology board I posted a reply that somehow got eaten by SI and never showed.
SI is on a strict diet and as far as I know, it doesn’t eat posts. I also believe that if your comment had posted to the site, something of it would be visible to the moderators.
Occasionally a member will zig instead of zag and a post is accidentally deleted in some way. I’ve done it myself. I once previewed a long post I had written, and forgot that I hadn’t actually saved it yet before I clicked on another link, and my comment went poof. If I find myself spending time on a long post, I cut and paste it into Notepad in case something goes kerputz.
Occasionally a member will zig instead of zag and a post is accidentally deleted in some way. I’ve done it myself. I once previewed a long post I had written, and forgot that I hadn’t actually saved it yet before I clicked on another link, and my comment went poof. If I find myself spending time on a long post, I cut and paste it into Notepad in case something goes kerputz.
I have lost posts from time to time in exactly the same manner. It does happen, but I do not believe SI is to blame. When I changed my ISP (Internet Service Provider) the problem stopped.
[Mike Durning] I have lost posts from time to time in exactly the same manner. It does happen, but I do not believe SI is to blame. When I changed my ISP (Internet Service Provider) the problem stopped.I post on many different websites and have never had this problem on any other website. However this is the only site using this type of software (whatever it is). In my area I do not have many choices of ISP’s and mine is the best.
John
I did notice a couple days ago that if there is a lot of tagging in a post - bold, italic, quote, linking, etc - it does seem to crash the post. The title of the post appears, but the body text doesn’t. The workaround (while Aaron tries to fix it) is to either cut the post into two or to reduce the tags in the post.
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
I’m not quite smart enough (well informed enough?) to know for sure, but I think these problems occur sometimes because of things going on client-side. That is, browsers do a fair amount of javascript processing and stuff and if the browser (and other processes going on on your PC) is really busying your CPU, it can break a post. I’ve personally only seen this happen when I had a tab open in my browser (or more than one) that I knew was doing some really heavy script processing… it slowed everything browser related on other tabs and something in the process of transmitting a post clobbered it partially. But even when I try to do this on purpose, I can hardly ever make it happen.
Security software may be a factor as well.
I’m not sure what some of these “Internet Security Suite” type apps are doing with browser content. But many of them claim to be checking web pages for various threats.
If you have a frequent problem it might be worth it to try disabling your anti-malware stuff for a while and see if it makes a difference.
It is also possible that the filters we use to process tags—as Jay mentioned—have an intermittent problem. Again, I haven’t been able to make that happen. So can’t really test it. If anyone can get it down to a repeatable set of steps, it will be much easier to study it.
Another possibility: I think it might be possible to work on a post for so long that your session times out and when you “save”/submit it, you’re no longer logged in. You should see a “access denied” or something like that when that happens—and I don’t know if the browser’s “back” button will take you to your post or to an empty form in that case.
If you use the “keep me logged in” checkbox on the sign on page, that should prevent that scenario.
An ISP related possibility: I don’t know much about the possibilities here but I do know that some ISPs switch IP addresses dynamically for their users. I’m not sure what happens if you’re in the middle of a session and your IP address changes between the time you logged in and the time you transmit the post. Or worse yet, if your ISP drops your connection. Don’t know much about how that stuff works, but it seems like there are some possibilities there…. which might explain Mike Durning’s experience.
Security software may be a factor as well.
I’m not sure what some of these “Internet Security Suite” type apps are doing with browser content. But many of them claim to be checking web pages for various threats.
If you have a frequent problem it might be worth it to try disabling your anti-malware stuff for a while and see if it makes a difference.
It is also possible that the filters we use to process tags—as Jay mentioned—have an intermittent problem. Again, I haven’t been able to make that happen. So can’t really test it. If anyone can get it down to a repeatable set of steps, it will be much easier to study it.
Another possibility: I think it might be possible to work on a post for so long that your session times out and when you “save”/submit it, you’re no longer logged in. You should see a “access denied” or something like that when that happens—and I don’t know if the browser’s “back” button will take you to your post or to an empty form in that case.
If you use the “keep me logged in” checkbox on the sign on page, that should prevent that scenario.
An ISP related possibility: I don’t know much about the possibilities here but I do know that some ISPs switch IP addresses dynamically for their users. I’m not sure what happens if you’re in the middle of a session and your IP address changes between the time you logged in and the time you transmit the post. Or worse yet, if your ISP drops your connection. Don’t know much about how that stuff works, but it seems like there are some possibilities there…. which might explain Mike Durning’s experience.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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