Let's get to the bottom of this "losing our posts" problem

Good your saving the text, that helps.
Have you tried Firefox? It is not exactly the same as Mozilla.
Firefox has certainly rendered a whole lot less frustration. Try d/ling it and see what happens.

debnes

I looked at that browser and it says Mozilla Firefox. Now I am confused. Do I already have Firefox or do I have Mozilla?

Dave himself started this thread and I am confident he is working on it. When he has some answers I am sure we will be the first to hear. Considering that DG has 329,352 members and 6,658 paid subscribers, it amazes me that the site is as problem-free as it is.

Thank you for sharing statistics.

june_nmexico- are you having issues with poof posts? I haven't noticed you posting that you've experienced a poof post problem in this thread or the first thread. If you have, please share the details if possible.

I don't believe the problem is on DG's end. Sorry, but I don't. He may have started this thread, but I doubt seriously if it's their problem. I don't know where the problem originated but... I think most of the people having poof post issues have something in common that we haven't put our finger on yet and it's only a matter of time before somebody stumbles upon it. We all garden and quite a few of us also are into recipes and photos. I think there's some site out there that we all went to that did this to us. I long ago suspected the people having problems all picked up some sort of a malicious little poltergeist bug somewhere from going to some site that flew in under the radars of our security applications that isn't a big enough problem to have been picked up by anti virus and malware applications as of yet.

I'd really like to try to figure out what is at the root of this so that it can be fixed if at all possible. No way I can do it on my own so I am very appreciative of anyone who suggests something to try. Their suggestions may be stabs in the dark but they're coming up with better than I could do on my own.

Like Countrygardens, I have never encountered the problem of losing posts, so I can't make any suggestions. I do use IE.

Try this Lauren>
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/launch/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=postlaunch

Yes, they are part of the same company, but the Firefox is just a browser. Mozilla has email also. My DH says it is different in several ways. Also when entering into the article writers forum it is so easy with Firefox. In other engines, it can be jumbled up and very difficult to get the articles like ya want them. Mozilla may work fine too for that, but I am using Firefox now, and it has been flawless so far.

Hi June!
Sure Dave started this thread, but it says "Let's" get to the bottom of this.. Meaning anyone who has something that might help is welcome to bring in a suggestion.

debnes

Ok, gotcha! That's the exact one I have right now but for some reason it says Mozilla Firefox v. 2.0.0.7 when I check on the version at the top under Help instead of Firefox 2. I know I have the exact same one you're referring to because when I went to download the file, my download manager popped up and asked me if I wanted to replace the existing file- I said no and went and looked up the version of what I already had so I stopped it from duplicating. We're good to go there. Looks as if I've always had this version on this particular computer which I have only had for just over a month or so.

I have a thought. I was trying to do a search for photos I had posted to DG and ended up on a site called Flikr (sp?). Some of my photos are posted at that site. How my photos got there since I'm not a member is beyond me but they are there. That's one of the new sites I've been poking around at. I'm not registered there, but I've been visiting it a lot. Other sites that are new to me that I started visiting right about the time this problem started that may be at the root are-
Midwest Invasive Plants Network- http://mipn.org/
PCTechBytes Computer Help Forums, I did register there to try to get help
Stewardship Network- http://www.stewardshipnetwork.org/site/c.hrLOKWPILuF/b.1361967/k.755C/The_Stewardship_Network.htm
allrecipes.com, did not register but poking around
Download.com, to get a conversion application
MacScouter- to get dutch oven recipes
2007 RedList- http://www.iucnredlist.org/
Wildflower Preservation Committee- http://www.thewppc.org/
Fox News Weather, used to use a different weather site
Amorphophallus for Beginners- http://www.snowsexotics.com/
secret recipes- http://recipesecrets.net/forums/, did not register but poking around

Do these look familiar to anyone having issues with poof posts? Is there anyway to tell when you visit a new site if they're downloading anything to your computer that could be an ickie or a nasty?

Mozilla is the company that develops the software....Firefox (browser), Thunderbird (which is the e-mail part) and a host of other things. http://www.mozilla.org/products/choosing-products.html

Here's more on what Mozilla software there is out there
http://www.mozilla.org/products/

Equilibrium -- Only once did I ever have a post-in-progress disappear. I was writing my post, then decided to go to another forum to check out something related to the thread I was answering. When I clicked on the thread I was answering, my post-in-progress had disappeared. Since then I just use the "Back" arrow to wind my way back to where I was and have had no problems. However, a few posters in some threads in which I am active have reported lost posts and I've referred them here.

I didn't mean to intrude in this thread. However, my DH runs a similar but much smaller forum site for an auto club and we haven't had this happen. We're curious as to what could be the cause.

Lauren, When you're in the browser you have are there tabs that come up for each page you open? This is a pretty cool thing. If I click on something I can always go back to the page I was originally on simply by clicking the tab. This is a Firefox thing. I like it a lot.

About the sites you listed... I have not been to any of those.

Right Terry, With Firefox you have to download additional email prgm if you need it (Roadrunner). With Mozilla the email is built in. I just got the FF browser, and use Yahoo for email.

:-D
debnes

Yes, if I click on a link in both IE7 and in Mozilla Firefox, new windows open up. I do like that feature.

Those are pretty much the only new sites I've been to recently. I am boring.

I haven't as of yet installed an e-mail client. Still waiting on a few things. When I do, I'll go with Incredimail. I heard Thunderbird was good but I don't want to play with any applications that I'm not familiar with unless I really need it.

Hey june_nmexico,

Equilibrium - you mentioned your photos showing up on Flikr...I started thinking about that, and I realized that all this stuff - at least the posts for all the poofs - started shortly after I signed up for Flikr at the invitation of a friend, and the DG beta testing with Pixamo. Have all the folks with problems signed on or visited those sites? Could that have anything to do with all this??

No, not in my case, never heard even of Flikr or Pixamo....

Oh well, there went that thought. :-( Back to the drawing board.....

Yes, my photos are over at Flikr but I'm not even registered there so I didn't put them there. Definitely started around the time I was over there looking for oddball plants like Prenanthes and cross sections.

Don't know what Pixamo is.

Its another photo sharing site - I think Dave was doing something with it...he had asked for volunteers to test it. Don't know what all happened with that, but the timing was slightly coincidental.

There is a flickr link at the bottom of this page, does DG have an interest in that now?

Flickr is different than Pixamo. Last I knew, Flickr was owned by Yahoo, and I don't believe NameMedia's bought them (yet!) LOL). There is someone at Flickr registered as Davesgarden.com and photos submitted to DG have been posted there under that username -- that's the profile that comes up if you click the Flickr link. I believe it's just a way of cross-marketing DG; having great DG garden photos appear at Flickr, leading to here via the Davesgarden.com username, is a way of marketing the site.

This is very strange. The D-Mail I sent Friday is gone! This morning when I was typing a new one it disappeared while I was typing. I hit the period key and away it went. This never happened before.

As a DG admin, I *can* delete an entire dmail (we do this on occasion when someone reports an attempt to use dmail for spam), but I can't make a single entry in anyone's dmail disappear, or even edit anyone's sent dmail (not even my own ;o)

If you think of your dmail like a thread (which is really what it is), an admin (there are three) has the ability to make the entire "thread" (read: dmail message with all the back-and-forth correspondence) disappear, but we can't do anything to any post within that thread. If a human can't do it, I don't think the system can/would make it disappear either.

Terry, I know I previewed and sent the Dmail. I don't think it was received. I am still waiting to hear. The 2nd one disappeared while I was typing. I didn't think the DG admin deleted either. The only new thing I had on the computer was a trial photo program but that lapsed over the weekend.

Hmm, I've lost a post occasionally. I think due to my error and/or my keyboard acting funky. I lost one yesterday when I hit Page Up to check a previous post. It's happened when I've hit Home too. I believe the action acuallly resulted in the page being refreshed. Some other fumbles caused the same "refreshing" result. Nothing I'd fault the DG site for.

I lost a Dmail once. Just the once, as far as I know.

It just wasn't there when I went to look at it.

This happened when I had NEVER deleted any Dmail whatsoever,regardless, so could not have happened by accident.

It was all very mysterious...........

R.

I hope the following information will help. I apologize in advance if it just adds to the noise. I am the Queen of lost posts, mostly the long ones that I can't afford to retype. I've traced my problems to 4 things:

1) If I attach a very large photo or an unsupported type of photo - like a 20M jpg or a tiff - and choose either 'preview' or 'save' the website takes a very long time to respond. When it does, it returns with a screen that is more or less blank except for the banner at the top followed by 'Replying to a thread'. Screen shot here: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/p.php?pid=4067194

2) Sometimes due to overreach while typing I accidentally hit the 'Enter' key with my little finger while I am typing. A few times when I finished a post and wanted to 'Send' I just hit enter instead. (I do this a lot, and it works on most sites which probably 'default' the 'enter' to 'Send') I have found that when I do this - hit the 'Enter' key either intentionally at the end of a post or by accident while typing - my entire post is wiped out and my browser 'jumps up to the top' of whatever page or thread I was on. Hitting the browser back arrow does not recover my lost post. (For some reason I almost always do this maddening thing when I have typed a large post.)

I just tried to reproduce this in my test thread. As you might expect, hitting 'enter' only caused a 'newline' - a time or two, then 'poof', I was redirected to my the top of my Home page and my test post was gone. I suspect the error I am trying to describe here has something to do with not just the 'enter' key but also the touchpad and wander cursor.

3) It took me a while to figure this one out. I use laptops, both with active touchpads. The slightest thing will cause the cursor to move to some miscellaneous position. Because the laptop keyboards seem slightly compressed and/or the different manufacturers like to move the non-alpha keys around, I often overreach, especially with my little fingers. Something that I type - and I've found that it often involves an attempt to shift-quote - results in an overreach to some other key(s) and wipes out all or part of my post.

I mentioned the [wandering] touchpad with this because often when this one happens I see [for a fraction of a nanosecond] that the cursor has moved to the top of the post somewhere and the text gets highlighted and then poof - gone. Ctrl-Z never seems to work for me when this happens.

4) A few times I have started a thread or made a post only to find later that it was missing. Eventually, I came to realize that in my haste I was doing the 'Preview' and then dismissing the page or going on to do something else without ever actually doing the corresponding 'Send'

Again, I hope some of this will help someone. I have had these things happen in both posts and Dmail, mostly with IE7 on XP but also with FireFox on Os X and with Mozilla FireFox on Linux Fedora 5.

Good observations, Scutler. When that second scenario occurs, instead of hitting back, try going back down to the bottom of the current page, clicking back within your text box where you typed the post, and hitting CTRL+Z. Does that work if you have not navigated away from the current page? And if you have gone to a new page, but hit back to your post's page and you click within the text box, does CTRL+Z do anything?

I'm curious about what you said about the touchpad...How many of the people having this issue are using laptops with touchpads, and how many are using desktops with standard mice?

I have a laptop (actually 2 of them) with a touchpad and have never had any problems. On my personal laptop, the right hand side of the touchpad acts like a scroll bar--when you slide your finger up and down it moves the page up and down. Sometimes I'll accidentally brush that while I'm typing, and that does make the screen jump up to the top, but it doesn't change where the cursor is. As soon as I start typing again, it jumps right back down to the message box and all my text is still there. My work laptop doesn't have the scroll feature on the touchpad, and nothing at all happens when I accidentally brush the touchpad. That being said, if you have the sensitivity of your touchpad set very low, then any slight touch might be interpreted as a click--I have mine set so that doesn't happen, I have to tap the touchpad before it realizes it's a click.

Also out of curiosity, I tried hitting enter about 500 times after I finished typing this, and nothing happened--I scrolled back up to the top of the message box and my post was still there. So if the post is disappearing if you hit enter, that's not normal (if you hit enter enough times, your post does sort of disappear because of the way the text box can only show so many lines at a time, but if you scroll back up then the post is still there)

I think that scutler may be on the right track, and I'm wondering if the other missing element is somehow the cursor is winding up on the preview button, and then "enter" is accidentally pushed. (I played around with that a bit, and caused it to happen, but I was able to recover from it by pressing my "back" arrow. A few more accidental keystrokes, though...it was gone.)

Equilibrium, I recall some of your replies to the helpdesk showed an html tag with what I think may be a "hard return" after each line. Are you perhaps hitting enter when you come to the edge of the text box? Or do you let the system wrap your text to the next line. (Maybe we're getting closer to unraveling this mystery yet ;o)

Here's a pretty good definition for hard/soft returns, at least from a word processing standpoint (the keys are the same whether you're using Word or typing in a text box online somewhere: http://wordtips.vitalnews.com/Pages/T0084_Understanding_Hard_and_Soft_Returns.html

If you are performing a soft return, rather than just continuing to type and letting the system "wrap" your text to the next line, that may help explain why the Shift key keeps cropping up with this phenomenon.

Ok, thanks Terry. I understand now.

I do both. Depends on what I'm typing whether or not I'm going to let it wrap or use enter. If I want to break or if I am creating a list for somebody, I will press enter.

What's an html tag?

HTML stands for "hypertext markup language." Imbedding HTML tags allow websites to perform formatting tasks (creating spaces between paragraphs, making indentions, lines, and to bold, underline, italicize text, etc.)

Here's a little more thorough explanation: http://www.web-source.net/html_codes_chart.htm and a list of basic HTML tags.

To better explain what I meant when I referred to your emails. When we receive a reply at the helpdesk, the system sometimes displays HTML tags that were imbedded in the sender's message (usually created by your word processing or email system, and are probably invisible to you.) In your notes (and one other person that I can recall), your replies (not your initial message, but any replies to us after that) frequently contain "=0D" at approximately the place where a line break would naturally occur.

Now, I don't know enough about HTML to tell you what "=0D" specifically means, but I figured it meant either you (and the one other person ;o) both had something unusual in your email system setup, or you were hitting a soft or hard return after each line of your message instead of letting the system wrap it to the next line for you.

OK, I guess I do html code already when I put something in quotes.

I have no idea what's causing the "=OD" but what ever it is, I've been doing it for years. Also too, I'm not creating them so my system must be doing it when I used to use Incredimail. I don't have an e-mail client right now but I will sooner or later. If this might be at the root, why am I losing posts now and didn't back then?

Equilibrium, I don't think your email program has anything to do with this problem, but I do suspect that a combination of shift-enter (a soft-return command) may be at least partly to blame. That's just a hunch...hopefully it will give Dave a little more to go on. Thanks to Scutler - I think their observations may help us narrow down our focus a bit.

It would be really great to figure out what is doing this. I must admit that if I lose a post I typed because I didn't start it out in a word document to be able to paste it back into a post... I frequently don't have the time to start out all over again. I'm just sort of frustrated so any help is very much appreciated.

I just watched myself while I was typing and I let it wrap as you called it.

I think a lot people have experienced problems with making posts at DG. Losing text, slowness, double posting are some examples (some are operator faults, some are a fault of DG, and a good browser should not be at fault but who really knows).

It appears that most of us have figured ways around losing long posts such as typing it into other applications such as Word or Notepad before pasting it in a DG post. I know I have and it looks like most folks on this thread have too. This might be a good tip for new people to avoid frustration.

A hard return or soft return if you want to hold down the shift key (even though I doubt this is a problem but maybe the browser is responsible?) is good to separate paragraphs and should be used for long posts. It helps the reader follow the writer's intent.

0D is a carriage return in Hex for anyone who really wants to know. 0A is a linefeed. I've tried all combos with a CR (carriage return or enter) - Shift, Ctl, and Alt. Shift and Ctl in conjunction with the Enter key just make another CR in the message box.

Alt-Enter in IE7 will toggle between full screen (no tool bars) and whatever setting you were at but I will still be in the same message box with no extra CRs inserted.

If I do a tab then I am placed in the Image text box. If I hit a return right after that it looks like I might have posted a reply but actually didn't (I get a screen that says Replying to a thread. When I go back all my text is gone. Thank goodness I saved this in Notepad.

Yesterday I didn't have time to get in on the discussions. Last night I spend maybe 10min in my Test thread trying to reproduce and characterize the problems I described earlier but without much success. For one thing, although I have generally have issues with what I've referred to as the "wandering" cursor, try as I might last night I could not even recreate that phenomenon. However, I have managed to (unintentionally) wipe this post out at least 3 times in the last few minutes (and even though it's only a few lines am getting tired of retyping it).

I am certain that my right little finger and more specifically and overreach or incorrect reach of that finger is heavily involved in both Problems 2 and 3 described above. Just now when I wiped everything out 3 times my right hand was going for the 'shift' to do a cap but hit one or more of the arrow keys instead or in addition to the shift. (To create these errors I may be depressing multiple keys simultaneously, perhaps catching the corners of several at once.) Right now I am on a MacBook Pro using Firefox on OsX, BTW. One thing I know for sure is that I for one have become very wary of depressing anything around shift and quote with my right hand while speed typing, because that is when a lot of my problems occur.

Last night I did find another gotcha involving the 'Enter' key scenario, but I don't think this is the exact combination which has caused Problem #2 for me in the past. This one is very repeatable, however. If for some reason the cursor ends up in the box under the word 'Image' below and you hit the 'Enter' key, you loose your post and get the 'Replying to a thread' screen (description and link in Problem #1 above).

Lastly, I've heard a number of people argue that this didn't start happening until recently. I can't say that none of these things ever occurred for me in the distant past, but the rate of occurrence does seem to have accelerated considerably in the last few months. I wonder if either changes to the browsers or even to the site or both may have exacerbated this. Could the browser's have added additional shortcut keys? One thing that I have noticed is that until recently (a few months ago), when I lost my posts I could usually get them back either with 'Edit' 'Undo' or with the Browser's back arrow. Then suddenly a few months ago, these 'features' stopped working for me.

I will try to do some more testing perhaps tonight.

I am an old hunt & peck typest, so never have a "poofing post" problem. I joined here in 2002 & have only lost a couple of posts. (I post a great deal!) Every time I know exactly what happened, I HIT THE WRONG KEY! or going to minimize the page, accidentally hit the close instead.

I just discovered that if I accidentally hold down the ctrl key instead of the shift key, it will do lots of different things, depending on which key I press with the ctrl key. I was trying to capitalize a letter, and hit the ctrl key instead. I can't remember which letter I also typed, but it opened a new window in my home page. The other window was still open also though.

Then I tried it again using lots of different letters and sometimes it brought up a blue screen and sometimes it opened an html code page.

I draw cabinet layouts & such on power point. If I hold down the "Ctrl" key, it makes the arrow pad keys move things slower on the page. Haven't tried it on any other things.