Lost posts after lengthy compositions: the bane of my existence

Nothing infuriates me quite like some random failure or error when making a lengthy, carefully-composed post someplace and then finding everything I typed gone in a flash after hitting “back” and discovering that the browser has dropped the cached page, just so that the geniuses on the website in question can take the opportunity to show me a fresh advertisement.

Does anyone have knowledge of a product that never loses your text input fields, regardless of what breaks when you hit submit? I feel I have a great deal of insight now into how people go postal.

I have crashed with Firefox 2.0.X many times and come back “restoring old sessions” and find that my post is there in the edit window in near entirety.

If you’re experiencing errors with posting, that’s a different issue. But try a browser change to see if it helps.

EDIT:
I’ll add if you do get Firefox or already have it, load the Addblock Plus Add-On as well as the Filterset.G Updater for Addblock-Plus. That should take care of a lot of your problem with advertisement issues.

Some forums (WoW) will manage to lose your junk even when you hit the back button. I’ll bet there’s an extension for this, I’m looking right now.

If I start typing anything over 2 paragraphs, I’ve got some habit I’ve gained over the years of firing up Word and copy/pasting over there to continue typing. When I’m done, I copy/paste back.

It’s called “type it in Onenote first”, unfortunately.

My extension search petered out quickly, sorry.

I just got exposed to this app this week – I’m loving it for GTD use. It’s just great.

The bastard component here is the “EXPIRES” tag. I’m of the opinion that hitting “back” in the browser should refer to your history, and that the publisher of whatever site your on has no business whatsoever trying to amend something that’s just a record of what you’ve already seen. The ideal browser would let you check a box and always, with no exceptions – EVER – just pull exactly that page from cache, and would never fail to cache a page to begin with. And I wouldn’t tolerate from the developer any of those tired excuses about generated content, either: if it had enough data to display a page to begin with, it had enough HTML to save the damn thing. Any expectation on the user’s part that those pages will continue to work for later branches outside of the context they were saved in are failings in the user’s expectation and/or the site’s implementation, but still no reason not to provide the cache.

Always type long compositions elsewhere, then paste them into your browser. Browsers are such poor editors that I generally want to do this anyway. Any other in-browser trick you pick up is unlikely to be as reliable, robust, or easy.

I got spoiled by Safari, unfortunately, which (for me) has always done a very good job of keeping form data for previous pages. IE7 (vista), so far, has been dramatically the opposite experience. Which is doubly annoying because I like the browser quite alot in many ways, and would rather use it than firefox. Though I really have not given firefox a chance on this platform yet.

WoW’s forums software is the worst for this. I almost always back up my post to notepad before hitting submit. With all the money they got, they have no excuse for such lame forum software.

While it is fun to blame it on ads, because yeah why not… the culprit here is your browser, just make sure it is set to not load new pages except once per session - i think firefox buried this setting somewhere, but it still exists.

And then when you do that, shoot yourself before you submit trouble tickets about websites not working. IE used to by default cache everything per session and the complaints I used to get about sites not working properly were all related to this “feature”.

Chet

Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, then hit submit?

You could easily write a greasemonkey script to automatically copy to the clipboard when posting.

I never bother with text editors before posting. The CTRL-A, CTRL-C thing has saved my ass more times than I can count though and I do it without thinking if I’m typing anything for more than five minutes.

Not the ads, chet. The dip-shit admins who expire everything they serve up, so that they can serve more ads every time you hit “back” to make another selection.