Lost page/archive

[Cille]

So I need to revive this topic again because the same thing just happened to me when I created and then edited my first thread here (“Cille’s Unoriginal Thread Title” in the Art Gallery section). I guess it needs to be republished, except that the whole thing is likely a trainwreck now since I edited all three posts and they all got eaten. And also there may be two threads with that title because after the first one disappeared into the void I gave up and tried making a new one which also never showed up.

So… help? 😀

[JR19759]

@Cille- There you go, I’ve gotten one of the threads back for you. I think it’s the second because it ended up in the spam folder and only has one post in it. Haven’t been able to find the other one, but at least you have a thread to work with.

[Cille]

Hooray, my thread. Thanks for rescuing it. I don’t mind starting over reposting what I have as long as it’ll stick around this time.

Do you have any idea if this issue is something that can be prevented? I wouldn’t want there to be a crisis every time I want to edit a post, especially since there doesn’t seem to be a preview option before submitting.

[JR19759]

I’m not sure because I don’t know exactly what you did. The only time I’ve seen a thread disappear completely is when the first post has been deleted. It unteathers the thread and puts it into spam.

[Cille]

Here’s my general order of operations, if it helps.

1. Wrote the posts ahead of time in Word for quick copy-pasting.

2. Copied the text for the first post into the New Topic field and hit Submit.

3. Got a weird 403 error (I think; I haven’t been able to pull it up in my browser history) about an invalid function or something.

4. Ended up retyping the last paragraph in the topic field because it was smaller than the rest of the post and deleting the pasted small text. This time when I submitted, the thread went through.

5. Edited the post to remove some HTML code that was showing up around the first and second paragraphs (the ones I hadn’t retyped). This edit went through with no issues.

6. Pasted the text for the second post from Word and got the same error page when I tried to submit.

7. Reckoned that there was some formatting weirdness with Word and moved the text over to a Notepad file and copied from there.

8. Posted the second and third posts with no issue. Each of these contained embedded image BBCode from Imgur.

9. Noticed that the text in the first post was bigger than the rest. Decided that I cared about consistency and edited the first post, re-pasting the text from Notepad.

10. At this point the first post disappeared. I also didn’t see the thread in the Art Gallery index. Panicked and decided to edit the original post text into the second post because I wanted my thread intro to be at the top before the picture posts.

11. The edited second post also disappeared. On my profile page it showed me having 0 topics and 1 posts. At this point I decided to go for broke and edited the third post too. I first edited it to say something about my posts being eaten, and that seemed to go through fine, but when I then edited it again to paste in my OP text, it too disappeared.

12. Tried making a new post in this thread, again pasting in the OP text, and got a message about having already posted that text.

13. Tried starting over and making a new thread with the same pasted OP text, which immediately got sucked into the void.

So if I had to guess, I’d say the board doesn’t like it when you re-enter text you’ve already posted, even if you’re just editing rather than posting the same thing twice. Either that or it has a grudge against Word. Although the formatting issues seem to be enough of a reason to stick to Notepad.

Actually I think that answered my question. I just need to make sure there’s enough of a content change when I edit something that the board doesn’t get mad at me and eat the post.

[Author]

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