Feature request

[vossron]

Roger, it is devastating to work for, say, a half an hour on a thoughtful and lengthy PM reply (or perhaps a post), and then hit the Submit button and receive the error message "The server is too busy, try again" and have the entire composition lost. You have no idea the horrible feeling that creates (it just happened to me). The back button doesn't retrieve it, nor does history. Is there anything you can do to preserve the work? Thanks.

[Roger_Dooley]

I've never seen that error on this site - we've got plenty of server capacity for current traffic levels. Either it was some odd transient issue like a load spike or perhaps an ISP problem.

I've seen problems with people who are blocking cookies and a session times out, resulting in loss of a post. I assume that's not the problem here.

My best advice (and one that I use when posting to blogs, other forums, etc.) is to do a Ctrl-A (selects all of the text) and Ctrl-C (copies it to the clipboard) prior to submitting a lengthy post. If for some reason the post fails, I can either paste (Ctrl-V) the content back in and try again, or even save it in Notepad to post later. I sometimes connect to the Web via WiFi or cell phone connections that aren't the most reliable, and I've learned the hard way to copy my work.

[vossron]

Maybe it's a free "feature" of SEO; I'll take a screen shot next time it happens. After I get the message, I tend to Ctrl-A for a while, then I get lazy and then it happens again.

I think it would be possible for the submit buttons to write the text to a temp file on our side before attempting to send, but that might need to be deep in SEO to make it happen.

[Daniel12]

It looks like the server is already passing a "Cache-control: private" header command which should (theoretically) override any default caching algorithms and save your posts, but sometimes compliant browsers do funny things. I think it's mainly IE6 that's known for its odd behavior... is that the browser you're using, vossron?

[vossron]

No, I use one with even more odd behavior: Safari.

[Daniel12]

Uh oh, can't help you there. I've used Safari maybe twice, and that was for testing WebKit's handling of some CSS property or another.