Where, and why did it go?

[jajrussel]

If it is gone it is gone there isn't much I can do about it. The fact that it was unfinished, well it is probably just as well that it is completely gone, because I do not want half unfinished thoughts of mine just showing up somewhere.

 

Now what I am referring to is twice maybe three times what I was working on disappeared because of what I did while the work was in progress. Once while writing a response to a post I wanted to review a statement made on a preceding page. It is apparently wrong to assume that just because there is a response box at the bottom of each page that what you are typing will follow you if you change pages. It is also wrong to assume that if you go back to the page that contained the box you were writing in, that what you were writing will still be there.

 

Next it was just a small misspelled word, so badly misspelled that there were no suggestions listed. Seeing that there were no suggestions I clicked on the page to clear the suggestion box then decided to just retype the word. The word was supposed to be that and that is not that difficult to spell, but my fingers do not always go where I want them to go, and yes I was being lazy using the suggestion box to begin with. The problem apparently is that somehow I managed to highlight the word in grey then thinking I could just make the word go away because it was highlighted by hitting the backspace key. Wrong, wrong, wrong, everything gone, and I am on a different page.

 

I looked up my own profile just to see if I had accidentally posted a half thought and simply could not remember which post I was responding to. Some of them do get to look alike sometimes, and I am a little tired. Nothing there thankfully. Though having now read some of my own past post it would be easily understood if someone reading what I have intentionally posted considered them to be half thought out thoughts.

 

Okay, now that I an done howling at the moon, can someone tell me how to use the quote feature selectively? Do you have to take the whole quote, then delete everything but what you want to remain of the quote? How do I single out a single statement? I see where people have done it, while others seem satisfied with quoting the entire post. Is there a copy and paste trick?

[swansont]

Yes, you have to delete text that you don't want included. There are two editing modes, and you can switch between them with the little light switch in the upper left of the editing pane. In one of them you have to put in the quote tags by hand (or copy/paste), and this seems to be necessary of you want to quote multiple sections with your responses in between. In the other it no longer seems to allow you to do anything but have a single quoted section, and in that mode it is possible to accidentally delete the quote box.

[arc]

Wrong, wrong, wrong, everything gone, and I am on a different page.

 

Yup, done that a lot. Always when I'm tired. Restart a post and go to "More reply options" you will see a "Last auto saved" in the lower left corner. It should recover all or most all of your content. It usually works well unless you are slow and take your time to write like I do. Sometimes I lose the connection to the forum and don't realize it, I will write for an hour or so, a lot of editing, did I mention I'm really slow? And then I try to post and lose everything from that last hour or so. AHHHH! No fix for that as far as I know. Though someone who is computer savvy could probably recover it.

 

It hasn't happened in quite a while though, maybe since the big fix done here a while back. It became serious enough to me that I copied the bigger posts to note pad first before posting, just in case.

Edited October 25, 2013 by arc

[StringJunky]

 

Yup, done that a lot. Always when I'm tired. Restart a post and you will see a "Last auto saved" in the lower left corner. It should recover all or most all of your content. It usually works well unless you are slow and take your time to write like I do. Sometimes I lose the connection to the forum and don't realize it, I will write for an hour or so, a lot of editing, did I mention I'm really slow? And then I try to post and lose everything from that last hour or so. AHHHH! No fix for that as far as I know. Though someone who is computer savvy could probably recover it. It hasn't happened in quite a while though, maybe since the big fix done a while back.

If you think you are going to take a long time why not write it in Word or similar and then copy/paste when you are ready?

[arc]

If you think you are going to take a long time why not write it in Word or similar and then copy/paste when you are ready?

 

I tend to under estimate how long it will take me to answer. Once I start I will pause, edit, reedit, I lose track of time. I did use Word on some big posts out of fear of losing them when the connection to the forum was a problem.

[StringJunky]

 

I tend to under estimate how long it will take me to answer. Once I start I will pause, edit, reedit, I lose track of time. I did use Word on some big posts out of fear of losing them when the connection to the forum was a problem.

Had a play and I don't know if this will add anything for you but you should click the page Refresh first then click anywhere in the textbox. Then click View Autosaved Content and you get this:

 

 

Click Restore Content to put it back.

 

The saved material is actually stored on your computer, not the server, so it would appear it can be retrieved ...probably in the cache of your browser.

Edited October 25, 2013 by StringJunky

[arc]

Had a play and I don't know if this will add anything for you but you should click the page Refresh first then click anywhere in the textbox. Then click View Autosaved Content and you get this:

 

Autosave.JPG

 

Click Restore Content to put it back.

 

The saved material is actually stored on your computer, not the server, so it would appear it can be retrieved ...probably in the cache of your browser.

 

Nice Thank you.

[StringJunky]

Also I've found, you can actually shut the computer down - as long as you haven't set your browser to clear the cache on shutdown or used some other app like Ccleaner - the unfinished post will still be there in the relevant thread if you follow the procedure I mentioned before, without the refresh.

Edited October 26, 2013 by StringJunky

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Next it was just a small misspelled word, so badly misspelled that there were no suggestions listed. Seeing that there were no suggestions I clicked on the page to clear the suggestion box then decided to just retype the word. The word was supposed to be that and that is not that difficult to spell, but my fingers do not always go where I want them to go, and yes I was being lazy using the suggestion box to begin with. The problem apparently is that somehow I managed to highlight the word in grey then thinking I could just make the word go away because it was highlighted by hitting the backspace key. Wrong, wrong, wrong, everything gone, and I am on a different page.

This one nails me fairly often. If your cursor isn't in the text box, backspace means "previous page", not "delete text", so clicking in the wrong place makes your browser eat your post.

 

Even worse, on my laptop there's no Home key, so I try to press Cmd-Left to go to the beginning of the line. Nope, that's "Back" in the browser, but "Home" in every other application I use. So I'll be halfway through a post and whoops, now it's gone.

[StringJunky]

If you accidentally backspace the page, follow the same procedure I outlined earlier starting with going back to the relevant thread then do a page refresh. The autosave feature updates every two minutes so if you backspace too early in the first two minutes, nothing was saved, so you are screwed.

Edited October 26, 2013 by StringJunky