Is this PF or something else?

[zoobyshoe]

Lately PF seems to refresh itself while I'm trying to compose a post and the whole post is lost. It's becoming irritating. I haven't noticed any kind of automatic refresh anywhere else online. It seems to only happen here while I'm composing a post.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I haven't run across this problem. Is it persistent?

 

[zoobyshoe]

I haven't run across this problem. Is it persistent?

Thanks for responding!

It seems to have started about two weeks ago. It seems time dependent: I get about ten minutes to type a reply, then the page automatically refreshes, wiping out what I've written. I often take longer than ten minutes, especially when I'm checking references in another tab or hunting up a url or bunch of them. It hasn't happened today, but I haven't spent so much time on any post today. FWIW, I haven't had the problem when spending a long time on e-mail replys. Only here.

 

[berkeman]

Any chance you accidentally hit Ctrl-R while typing?

 

[Ygggdrasil]

If you use firefox, there's a useful add-on that can help recover text entered into reply boxes and forms:

http://lazarus.interclue.com/

 

[zoobyshoe]

Any chance you accidentally hit Ctrl-R while typing?

That combination of keys doesn't seem to be near others I might use, no. But I was wondering if I am doing something I don't realize to cause it.

 

[zoobyshoe]

If you use firefox, there's a useful add-on that can help recover text entered into reply boxes and forms:

http://lazarus.interclue.com/

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[ThomasT]

Lately PF seems to refresh itself while I'm trying to compose a post and the whole post is lost. It's becoming irritating. I haven't noticed any kind of automatic refresh anywhere else online. It seems to only happen here while I'm composing a post.

I haven't noticed automatic refreshes (maybe I'm not exceeding the time limit), but there's always, afaik, been a time limit wrt composing and submitting PF posts. It used to be that if you exceeded the time limit, then what you wrote would only be temporarily lost, that is, you could recover it by going back in your browser's history. But now that doesn't seem to be the case.

One solution is to simply compose long posts (which might also involve some research) offline in a simple text editor like notepad -- then hit the "quote" or "new reply" button and copy/paste.

Another solution is to simply hit the "Preview Post" button every few minutes.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I haven't noticed automatic refreshes (maybe I'm not exceeding the time limit), but there's always, afaik, been a time limit wrt composing and submitting PF posts. It used to be that if you exceeded the time limit, then what you wrote would only be temporarily lost, that is, you could recover it by going back in your browser's history. But now that doesn't seem to be the case.

One solution is to simply compose long posts (which might also involve some research) offline in a simple text editor like notepad -- then hit the "quote" or "new reply" button and copy/paste.

Another solution is to simply hit the "Preview Post" button every few minutes.

I recall the problem used to be that if you didn't click the "remember me" box, you could be automatically logged out while composing a long post. When you then when to submit it, you'd get a message that you were logged out and the post would go into oblivion. This time limit is a new and different thing that I don't think I encountered before two/three weeks ago. I've been taking a long time to write posts since I joined, so that's not recent. I am sure I have started posts, gone out for two hours to have coffee, come back, finished them and submitted them without problem, in fact.

At any rate, your suggested solution is what I've already been doing today.

 

[ThomasT]

I recall the problem used to be that if you didn't click the "remember me" box, you could be automatically logged out while composing a long post. When you then when to submit it, you'd get a message that you were logged out ...

Yes, and then when I would log back in then I could go back a couple pages in the browser's history and click on the page where I was originally logged in and composing, and what I wrote would be there. But for the past year or so (maybe since I began using Mozilla Firefox instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer?), the time limit seems to be about the same, but I'm not able to recover the orginally composed text as I was before.

... and the post would go into oblivion.

This is what's new in my experience. I haven't yet experienced the automatic refresh that you're talking about, though I have recently (due misjudging the time involved and not saving to clipboard, or hitting the "Preview Post" button) had to rewrite a post or two on learning, after hitting the "Submit Reply" button, that I had been automatically logged out.

This time limit is a new and different thing that I don't think I encountered before two/three weeks ago.

I'm doing a little experiment with this post.

EDIT (Results of experiment): I did get automatically logged out and then went back to the "reply to topic" page in the browser's history, and what I had written wasn't there. So, I then went to the next page (up) in the history, clicked on it, and got a message saying that the contents would have to be resent, so I clicked on that and my post appeared (that is, what I wrote was posted in the thread).

So there's a time frame to automatic logout which is refreshed via clicking on new threads (and pages), or hitting "Preview Changes" button if composing in the "reply to topic" box. And lost text is recoverable, but not, for me, in quite the same way as it used to be. What seems to me to be different is that, whereas what I was writing used to be recoverable via going back to the original "reply to topic" page, now it's, apparently, necessary to go to the next page (up) in the history (corresponding to where the message would have been posted if I hadn't been automatically logged out).

I am sure I have started posts, gone out for two hours to have coffee, come back, finished them and submitted them without problem, in fact.

Not me. I always get automatically logged out if I don't refresh the timer.