Bugga

[Shedhand]

I just spent 3 hours doing a WIP report on my new guitar build. I clicked submit post and after about 5 mins got a timeout message and to contact admin to increase the timeout. Never seen that before. Anyway, seems my 3 hours was wasted as its disappeared into the ether. When the posts get "autosaved" where does it get saved to? Your server or my hard drive. I was using my iPad and there were 7 pictures in the post - average size about 250kb. Any ideas please? This isn't thefirst time I've had problems posting pictures in posts from my iPad.
Cheers
Mike

[RoyG]

I just spent 3 hours doing a WIP report on my new guitar build. I clicked submit post and after about 5 mins got a timeout message and to contact admin to increase the timeout. Never seen that before. Anyway, seems my 3 hours was wasted as its disappeared into the ether. When the posts get "autosaved" where does it get saved to? Your server or my hard drive. I was using my iPad and there were 7 pictures in the post - average size about 250kb. Any ideas please? This isn't the first time I've had problems posting pictures in posts from my iPad.
Cheers
Mike

Mike,


Commiserations …… I've had the same thing happen to me when I've been writing a long post - WIP etc. What I do to overcome the problem is to write the post off-line in a word processor (e.g. LibreOffice, MS Office, etc.). I assemble the photos that will accompany the post, but I don't add them into the word processor document – I just have the photos available and I'll have already worked out where in the text I want each photo to appear, so the time on-line with the post being edited is minimised. Avoid using any formatting – i.e. no bold, no italics, no font changes, no fancy paragraph formatting, etc.



Then, after saving my draft post in the word processor, I cut and paste the text from the word processor, into the Forum's post editor. If you're using MS Word, if I remember rightly there is a special non-standard “cut and paste” commands burried in the Edit Menu that allow you to “Cut/Paste Text Only – No Formating” - if you use that option you eliminate the possibility that some formatting copied across from the word processor will cause strange things to appear in your post on the forum.


Then you can add your photos to the post, and apply any formatting you need (bold, italics, etc). That's the process I've used for this post. It works OK.


If pasting from your word processor results in a Font that you don't like the look of being used in the Forum post, then select all of the forum post, and apply a new font using the Font tools on the forum. The added benefit of this approach is that if the forum does time-out and fail to save your new post, you still have a backup copy on your computer, so the work required to re-post it is minimal. You also get an English Australian Spell Check instead of the default spell check on this forum which seems to be English USA.



Hope that helps.


Roy

[FenceFurniture]

+1 for composing offline for long posts. I've found that most formatting carries over, particularly bold and colours.

There's also a neat way around inserting the pics in place in the offline document, but it may not work as easily with an iPad. I upload the pics to my album, and then click on each pic and copy the BBcode which I insert in the offline document (which just regards it as text). Then copy and paste the lot, and continue editing online. If you still have a fair bit of editing to do online it's a good idea to every now and then do a ctrl A (to select everything in the window) and ctrl c to copy it to your your scratchpad (or whatever it's called). That way it's always copy and ready to repaste if there's a glich and you only lose the work you've done since the last copy (say 5 minutes).

When you've finished you can go back to the pic upload window and attach the pics as well (which allows people with miniature screens to see them, apparently) (you drag them into the insert inline position, or summink).

[ubeaut]

If this happens again:

Try to do the thread/post again in the same section, it is more than likely that it will be saved and a message will come up on the bottom of the text box saying (Restore Auto-Saved Content).

If you click on that it should restore everything up until the last restore point (which I think is about every minute). It also does a restore if you inadvertently leave the page and should have done a restore when you submitted the thread/post that timed out. You will see a little sign with a yellow background come up every now and again in the bottom right hand corner of the text boa saying Auto-Saved.

Worst comes to worst you should have been able to use your back button to go back to the page you had just lost, copy it, do a refresh then and paste the copy to the empty text box and try again.

But the Auto-copy is the best. Not sure if it is still available if you log out and clear the cookies but I think it should still work.

Hope this has been of some help.

Cheers - Neil

[Shedhand]

If this happens again:

Try to do the thread/post again in the same section, it is more than likely that it will be saved and a message will come up on the bottom of the text box saying (Restore Auto-Saved Content).

If you click on that it should restore everything up until the last restore point (which I think is about every minute). It also does a restore if you inadvertently leave the page and should have done a restore when you submitted the thread/post that timed out. You will see a little sign with a yellow background come up every now and again in the bottom right hand corner of the text boa saying Auto-Saved.

Worst comes to worst you should have been able to use your back button to go back to the page you had just lost, copy it, do a refresh then and paste the copy to the empty text box and try again.

But the Auto-copy is the best. Not sure if it is still available if you log out and clear the cookies but I think it should still work.

Hope this has been of some help.

Cheers - Neil

Thanks Neil. That worked but had to reinsert the photos. Continued to the end of my WIP report. I then hit the "Preview post" button and it timed out again and everything got lost again. I started the post again, hit the restore last saved tag but I only got back what I originally did the other night - minus the pics again. Another 3 hours down the crapper. So I give up. There must be some compatibility issue with the iPad. Back to Windoze notebook in future.
thanks for your help mate.
cheers
mike

ps. Another bug bear is that I keep getting logged out when I'm preparing a post. It's annoying having to log in every time I open something else when multi-tasking.

[ubeaut]

You had 1 hour of inactivity before being logged out. This has now been extended to 2 hours for all users.

If you are going to take longer than 2 hrs to set up a thread or post then I strongly advise you hit Ctrl A to highlight what you have worked on then Ctrl C to copy it, prior to hitting the Submit button. Then if there is a time out or your have to log in again you hit Ctrl V to paste what you copied (incl pictures, pdf's etc) and not lose anything.

Good idea to make this a standard practice before submitting anything. Including PM's emails etc. The way people talk about them I would have thought any of the iThings would be smart enough to do that for themselves. My Windows thing saves everything, especially when using Firefox and even if the entire net fails or the power goes out, when I get it back on it asks if I want it to reinstate what I was last working on.

Cheers - Neil

[Shedhand]

Thanks again Neil. Never to old or experienced to learn. FWIW, I only bought my iThing for one purpose but was sucked into using it for everything else. But of course not all things work as they should on my iThing compared to my LinuxThing or my WinThing.
cheers
Mike
ps. Close the thread please.