OK, that rules out the phone in your case. From the moment you had clicked the "New Thread" button until you clicked the "Post New Thread" button, do you think it is possible that more than 24 minutes had passed (think carefully about this one)?

@Andres: No, I don't think so. It was ten minutes, tops. But when I copied and pasted it, it posted fine. I'm guessing it was some kind of time issue, but it was no where near 24 minutes...

OK, that rules out a session time-out.

When you say you "copied and pasted it, it posted fine", where did you copy it from if you had already lost it?

Also, a question for everyone who has experienced this issue, when you hit the "Post" button and your message disappears, have you tried hitting the "back" button on your browser (mobile or PC, either one)? If so, what happened?

I've never tried hitting 'back'. Will try nxt time...

@Andres: I wrote it up in my wordpad and copied it from there. I always write my work on paper, before putitng into any technology (For this reason lol) And yes, I tried hitting back and it just went back to the Stories and Creative writing Thread list.

@Andres: it happened to me again i pressed back and it took me back and what i was going to post was still in the message box, so i tried a couple of times same problem

@Andres: just like @irishlove i tried to copy and paste and this worked. Great minds think alike

OK, so the "back" button helped you recover the message, at least that's a good tip for everyone until we fix this.

Is there anything different or peculiar that you did during or before this particular "lost" post? Since I am unable to reproduce this problem on my end, it would help a lot if we could identify some kind of pattern for when this tends to occur since it doesn't happen all the time. That pattern will help me pinpoint where exactly things are going wrong so I can fix it. If you've had this issue happen to you before, please post any such pattern you've noticed here so we can piece it together and solve this puzzle.

In the meantime, I'm going to put my detective hat on and look over the code to try and find what might be causing this seemingly random issue, but with thousands of lines of code for the Forums alone, it will be difficult for me to figure out what exactly is wrong without having a direction in which to look.

Needless to say, this is a very serious problem, as the last thing I want is for people to hold back for fear of losing what they post. So I would appreciate everyone's cooperation so we can get to the bottom of this and fix it. Just like with the crossed username issue, I know we'll be able to fix this, so it's just a matter of time.

Thanks!

@Andres: i did recieve a mail from someone im getting to know, after i made the post when it happened as ive said it took me to the main menu, i pressed back and the lost post was there, i think it could be my phone cause u did mention a time out issue, i think this is my phones problem not the site and with any long posts i'll copy and paste, hope this helps, and thanks

Pasting my replies in the other threads here so that all posts related to this issue are all in one place. I've also made this thread a "sticky" so it's easy to find (just go to "Report a problem" and it will be "stuck" to the top of the thread list).

OK, I've been able to reproduce this problem if I let the session expire. So I'm almost positive that is at least one of the causes of this issue. That said, a session shouldn't expire in 12 minutes and 20 seconds and I haven't yet been able to reproduce this issue with such a short wait period, but I'm going to continue testing and report back.


Do you remember what type of reply it was, was it a quick reply at the bottom of the thread or a regular reply (e.g. via the "reply" or "quote" buttons)? The logs for your activity around that time don't show a long period of inactivity (like in Ram's case above), so this looks like it was caused by something else. I hope it's not related to posting at the same time, because that would indicate an issue with the Forum script (like the crossed usernames issue we had before), and those are very difficult to fix. But let's keep documenting this issue and gathering evidence so we can get to the bottom of it and fix it completely. I won't give up!