Topic: Forum lost my entire post when I clicked Preview

I just logged in to the RME forum, typed a long reply to a thread, and clicked Preview, then I got a page saying "You don't have permission because you are not logged in" or similar.

When I clicked back, the text field was empty and my entire post was lost.

This is very poor behaviour. Even if my login session had somehow timed out, the forum could a) give me a login link that preserves my post and b) preserve the contents of the text field when you click Back.

Just dumping the user's text that they spent 30 minutes typing in is extremely poor manners!

2

Re: Forum lost my entire post when I clicked Preview

The text is not stored in the forum, but your browser AFAIK. Works for me using Firefox. The message was most probably that your session was invalid (timed out), together with a note that all you have to do is to refresh the page. In that case 'back' would have been wrong.

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

3 (edited by wildthing 2013-08-27 23:50:14)

Re: Forum lost my entire post when I clicked Preview

The RME error page said that I was not logged in, implying that I need to re-authenticate -- and yet the page did not contain any kind of login link. If there had been a login link then I would have clicked it, and furthermore I would expect my text to be preserved throughout the login process, so that after logging in I can re-submit my text (lots of web sites do this).

I don't recall the error page asking me to click Refresh -- and anyway, this makes no sense! Either a session is valid, or it's invalid and you need to re-authenticate.

Yes I am aware that the text is stored in the browser, but the default behaviour in modern browsers (unless overridden by the web site) is that when you click Back/Forward, pages are retrieved from the browser's cache and the contents of forms are preserved. I use Chrome and 98% of web sites behave like this.

When you click Back and your form data has vanished, it is because the web site is doing something to actively break this functionality. For example, setting unnecessary no-cache headers. I don't think you should break this standard browser behaviour unless you have a specific reason to.

Since there was no Login link, clicking Back was the only option I had. Please don't tell me I was "wrong" to click back: if the web site was properly behaved, my text would still have been there, and then I could have copied, re-authenticated, and re-pasted the text.

So I still maintain that with the weird session timeout behaviour, the unhelpful error page, and breaking the back-forward cache behaviour -- the web site is at fault in this case.

Re: Forum lost my entire post when I clicked Preview

Can not seem to reproduce the issue... Typed something, logged off from another forum window, got the same message, but hitting "back" did retain my message (Firefox).

Is this reproducible any time on your system, and with different browsers?


Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

5 (edited by wildthing 2013-08-28 23:45:55)

Re: Forum lost my entire post when I clicked Preview

I can't reproduce the "back" issue now, either.

When you get the message saying "You are not logged in. Please login or register.", if instead of clicking back, you do what the error page tells you to do by clicking the Login link in the header area, then you get back to your preview page with the text missing.

Maybe that's what I did. But even then, if I try that now then I'm still able to click back and retrieve my text.

But I think in this situation I just panicked that my text was lost, and tried to use my History to retrieve my earlier page instead of clicking Back, and maybe chose the wrong page in my History or something.

So I was wrong about the "back" issue. Sorry about that.

But I still do think the timeout is very short, and the error page didn't give me any confidence that my text was retrievable, or tell me correctly how retrieve it.

Re: Forum lost my entire post when I clicked Preview

The timeout was 30 minutes. I've increased the value to 45  minutes now. This must have been a long post (been there, done that...). I would suggest to either use an external editor in such a case (you can never totally rule out a browser crash or so also) or at least to copy the whole thing to the clipboard before proceeding...

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME