I ask that pawn shop man, "What's them three balls doin' hangin' on that wall?" (He) said, "It's two to one daddy, you don't get your things back out of here at all" - Blind Boy Fuller, Three Ball Blues
Hi I absolutely hate to complain about anything here, since I think that you guys are doing the greatest job of them all! Also, being myself a ?technically challenged? person, I suspect you might have nothing to do with the problems I face, and the problems might actually be at my end of the Internet.
Anyway, I?d like to ask your advice, since lately I have had numerous occasions, where I have written a post, or tried to answer one, for a good half an hour or more, and when I finally have wanted to use the ?preview post? function, I get to be transferred to the sites? main page, and everything I have written is being completely wiped out. In my case, you could of course argue that this is a blessing , but if this happens with other members as well, you are more than prone to lose valuable participation.
I use Windows XP and Mozilla Firefox, and am, by the way, writing this post for the 2nd time, because I made the mistake of wanting to ?preview? the 1st one.
Anyway, I?d like to ask your advice, since lately I have had numerous occasions, where I have written a post, or tried to answer one, for a good half an hour or more, and when I finally have wanted to use the ?preview post? function, I get to be transferred to the sites? main page, and everything I have written is being completely wiped out. In my case, you could of course argue that this is a blessing , but if this happens with other members as well, you are more than prone to lose valuable participation.
A couple of weeks ago I experienced something similar. It hasn't happened since but what I now do is select and copy what I've written before clicking preview. That way it's in the computer's clipboard and should my text get lost there's no re-typing required.
I haven't experienced that, although I rarely use Preview. Like BH, I've taken to copying everything to the clipboard when I type a long post, because I'm on a wireless connection and it drops once in awhile, sometimes in the middle of posting, when means you lose your work. I'll try Preview with this post and see what happens.
I think this may have to do with one of the forum's time out periods. Not to get too technical but the site checks a "cookie" to see if you are still logged on - and will time you out if there is a period greater than 15 minutes of no activity (you'll see at the bottom of the forum: "Users active in Past 15 minutes"). The site has no idea you are typing in a post, so typing does not count as "activity". So the Preview function, for some reason, thinks you are no longer on the site and dumps your stuff.... if you take longer than 15 minutes to compose a post. That's my theory anyway, this could be tested by someone with patience.
In any case, good advice from both BH and UB on copying or composing those long posts first on your local machine and then pasting them into a forum post.
Yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head, Slack. I recall this happening to me now. It actually didn't have anything to do with Preview, it happened when I would hit Post as well.
Users can control the length of their login period, no? Directly through the login process? You can select Login Forever, which actually isn't forever, just until you logout again.