My experience has been that when you write super long posts, that after a while the system just seems to time out and whatever you've been working on tends to just disappear. You can usually tell because instead of seeing the posted text appear you'll be taken back to the Paizo front page. Sometimes if that happens and you catch it in time you can back arrow your browser and recover it. Sometimes that doesn't work though and you just get a blank text window.
The absolute best thing you can do is highlight your post and hit ctrl+c to make a copy of your post before you click the button to post it. That way you can hit ctrl+v to instantly recopy it again if you need it, or you can recopy it to a word processor so you can work on it later.
As for the technical reasons and whatnot I haven't a clue and will bow to the limitless knowledge of the tech gurus. Hope my part helps you lose less posts though.
I hope the book was worth all that effort.
It would sadden me deeply to learn that you regretted buying AND lost your post.
Aaargh!!
I just lost a mammoth post due to this same issue. Unfortunately I hadn't read this thread yet. Hopefully another poster can learn from my mistake and follow the advice put forth here.
Another weird thing, when I backed up to the page after being kicked to the front I put the mouse over the "preview" button and it said "cancel".
Senior Software Developer
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Another weird thing, when I backed up to the page after being kicked to the front...
If you're kicked to the front page your post is lost. LOST. Never coming back. Hitting the back button will not help.
I am NOT happy about this and have some ideas about how to fix this but I don't know when I'll be able to get to it. For now, if you've spent any significant amount of time preparing a post, do a select-all and copy before hitting the "Submit Post" button.
It's a hard lesson to learn, but now, after years of losing posts, I almost always cut and paste as I go and tend to finish off the longer ones in Word.
Another weird thing, when I backed up to the page after being kicked to the front...If you're kicked to the front page your post is lost. LOST. Never coming back. Hitting the back button will not help.
Yeah, I found that out... ;-) I've been able to that with other boards, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. No real harm done, it's not like I was posting a posting a path to spiritual enlightenment.
I just found it odd that when I moused over the "Preview" button (after having jumped back) that the tool tip was showing "Cancel". I had hoped that information might prove useful to whomever it is that tinkers with the code.
Copy-paste has become something I use every time I post (even now!) because I've had posts I've worded what I felt was perfectly, only to have them deleted by some glitch. That is SO frustrating, so now, I always C-P every post I make before I sent it. It's an extra step, but the acute frustration it saves is worth it.
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For now, if you've spent any significant amount of time preparing a post, do a select-all and copy before hitting the "Submit Post" button.
For those who might be a bit less tech-savy, the keyboard shortcut for select-all is Ctrl-A (and copy is Ctrl-C). Sucks that this happens, but I've had it happen with almost every message board I've used; this isn't unique to Paizo.
I recently posted a thread in Off-Topic Discussions that has disappeared. It was a rather political post and could have conceivably offended someone. If it was removed for that reason, I would just like to know.
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Chief Technical Officer
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I recently posted a thread in Off-Topic Discussions that has disappeared. It was a rather political post and could have conceivably offended someone. If it was removed for that reason, I would just like to know.
We don't generally do that—at least, not without warning. I suspect it just went missing.
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I wrote a rather indept review of Carnival of Tears and lost it to the Paizo Gremlin. I finally re wrote it after a week, and I Copied the post before I submited it and BAM, post lost... I went back to "Write a review", Pasted my story, hit submit and it was all good. Apperantly the Paizo Gremlin likes posts that sit in the typing window a while.
Thank you for your response, Vic. This is rather unusual behavior for the gremlin as the thread already had at least two responses.
Thank you for your response, Vic. This is rather unusual behavior for the gremlin as the thread already had at least two responses.
Gremlins indeed.
Are you sure your post/thread is actually gone? I had the odd experience yesterday that I could only see half of the posts in the how-to-make-Thassilon-seem-10000-years-old thread. I only noticed the hidden posts by their presence as quotes in other peoples' posts, and was only able to actually find the original posts by looking at the authors' Profile and Recent Posts pages.
You might want to double check your 'Recent Posts' to see if your posts are visible there.
I'm pretty sure that the messageboard software that Paizo uses has a serious problem:
If you're working on a post and someone posts to the thread while you're editing your post, instead of posting it it eats it and dumps you to some main messageboard screen or something.
Obviously this is more likely to happen the longer your post is, as you'll spend longer writing it. I've also seen it happen (it JUST happened to me) if you're trying to start a new thread and something on the site changes.
Can someone who is somewhat tech savvy over there at Paizo look at the software in use? It appears that part of information it sends over when it tries to post is the current state of the thread/area, and if it doesn't match it results in an error condition. It would be nice if the error condition for "thread changed, update invalid" was NOT "transfer to generic main page and lose posting." I see complaints about this over and over, and it's pretty clear to me what the issue is. Yeah, everyone can do the "copy your post before hitting submit because the messageboard software is broken" thing, but it would be even nicer if it was fixed.
Hell, if it's open source software, I'd be happy to install it locally and take a look.
(hitting C-A C-C before submitting. bleah.)
EDIT: Ideally, it would be a screen that says "The thread/board has changed. Are you sure you want to post?"
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Senior Software Developer
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That's a good theory but that's not how our boards work.
There are several different causes for eaten posts and errors upon posting, and I'm squashing them one by one. I'd go into details but they're kind of tedious (and there are a lot of them because of the varying reasons for failures).
I will say that one failure mode that I have been trying to fix for MONTHS, that affected 10-12 posts per day, now only happens once every few days. So that's better.
That's a good theory but that's not how our boards work.
There are several different causes for eaten posts and errors upon posting, and I'm squashing them one by one. I'd go into details but they're kind of tedious (and there are a lot of them because of the varying reasons for failures).
I will say that one failure mode that I have been trying to fix for MONTHS, that affected 10-12 posts per day, now only happens once every few days. So that's better.
The answer is probably out there if I bother to look, but...did you guys write the boards yourselves, or use someone's PHP/ASP code?
Either way, you might be able to add some logging/error checking...but of course, if the problem is one of timing, you might "fix" the problem by trying to observe it...Heisenberg anyone? :P
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The answer is probably out there if I bother to look, but...did you guys write the boards yourselves, or use someone's PHP/ASP code?
Either way, you might be able to add some logging/error checking...but of course, if the problem is one of timing, you might "fix" the problem by trying to observe it...Heisenberg anyone? :P
It's all homebrew code. I'm guessing Gary already has some error log in it, as he knows how often certain reasons for crashes occer
That's a good theory but that's not how our boards work.
:-)
Well, peril of being in the software business, I make lots of guesses about why things fail.
Lost post counts have been pretty high lately (just observin' not tellin')--have one now, my most recent post on Heathy's Saltmarsh campaign discussion thread.
I've been up to as much as 4 or 5 a day lately.
...whenever you see the "system administrator has been notified" page, I get sent an email with tons of debugging information in it.
OMG
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Lost post counts have been pretty high lately (just observin' not tellin')--have one now, my most recent post on Heathy's Saltmarsh campaign discussion thread.
I've been up to as much as 4 or 5 a day lately.
...whenever you see the "system administrator has been notified" page, I get sent an email with tons of debugging information in it.OMG
yeah - latly I've lost all the posts by paizo people (and watcher - there something you're not telling us watcher!?) for the past hour or two
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Senior Software Developer
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Lost post counts have been pretty high lately
Yes, you are correct. We have a subsystem that's intended to keep all our servers in synch with each other regarding what posts are in what threads, and I've been overhauling that system pretty much non-stop for the past month or so. I've switched out the entire mechanism entirely a couple times, and done a bunch of tweaking in hopes of improving the situation.
The one we've had for the past few days has turned out to be even more evil than the evil monstrosity it replaced. (And that's pretty evil.)
About an hour ago I re-rolled the site with yet another mechanism, this one frankensteined together from what I hope are the best parts of the previous approaches. So far I'm cautiously optimistic, but time will tell.
[edit]I should clarify that I'm talking about the situation where posts made by others appear to be missing for some period of time, and eventually show up later. Actual lost posts are a different matter, and are characterized by a couple of different behaviors: either you get a "system administrator has been notified" message, or you get bounced to the main page.
Alas... the evil beast added an extra 30 minutes onto the age of a new thread I posted perhaps 30 minutes ago, and so it never graced the front page.
Edit: and I think it's considered bad form to bump a thread thats less than a day old...
[edit]I should clarify that I'm talking about the situation where posts made by others appear to be missing for some period of time, and eventually show up later. Actual lost posts are a different matter, and are characterized by a couple of different behaviors: either you get a "system administrator has been notified" message, or you get bounced to the main page.
Yah, I posted about the invisible post problem, but the thread is dedicated to annihilated posts. I'm too lazy to start a new thread - I figured the curious would look here if they were wondering about the problem without worrying about the semantics.
One thing though, and I never saw this here until recently, is that some of my own posts were invisible to me as well as the posts of others.
Invisibles in 3 pbps this morning. Nasty.