Cruelty in OS2World

[Einar Lygre]

Yesterday I prepared a new topic in the forum. I started the topic like this, but as I am not English I had to think an check some words and sentences while typing. And I did some other things like watching the news on TV and even backed a bread. And before posting I even remember other facts to put into to message.
So, at last I had finished my "long" story and pressed the Post button.
What happened. Everything - EVERYTHING - was deleted with a message about that I had been on the function for more than an hour. As I remember it also said I had to log in. Stupid - I am always loged in. May be I am wrong about the login message, but anyway in my anger I broke a pencil and a few other not to mention things.
What about a little warning?

Einar

[melf]

Hi, Einar certainly an irritating experience if you have prepared a longer posting. But I would never have dared to put my trust in, that the fill-in-form should work after such a long time; watching the news, baking a bread and so on .... I don't know about the log out settings, probably Martin knows. Anyway, if I were you I had written my message in a simple text editor first, e.g the default one, and then when finished pasting it in in the posting form.

Cheers

[Ben]

Einar,
 ..that is a depressing story, and not an unfamiliar one... but, there is a solution.

When that happens to me I simply push the browser back button, (left arrow), and all of my apparently lost work, will reappear from the browser cache, (in this case Firefoxs),.. as long as I did not close the browser or the tab containing the unfinished post.

Timeouts are normal for this type of software, so there will be no solution forthcoming from that side of things.

Also, if I know that I am going to be away from my keyboard mid-post, for a while, (happens to everyone), I copy what I have written into my clipboard, and if necessary, paste it into a text file in foresight, because of this very problem.

That, of course, will not bring back your dead post at this point in time, but it can help you to avoid the same thing happening to you in the future.

But you do have my sympathies... 8( for no one enjoys seeing a lot of hard, voluntary, work flushed down the computers maw

But one of the reasons that computers work the way that they do is to make you, the user, feel inadequate and to leave you feeling like you have no control over your work or your environment; helpless.

Windows users are doubly damned! That OS will gobble up your work like Pacman gobbles up pills! and I'm not even going to mention viruii, trojans, the NSA backdoor, and other invasive outsiders. If MicroLimp was a human being, it would long since have been charged with rape! for its invasive, and penetrating, practice of violating the user! and would have received awards and great accolaids for the wide-ranging variety and creativity involved in the myriad of ways that it does it!

[Doug Bissett]

When I log in, there is an option to stay logged in "forever". I always click on that, and I don't get bumped off.

[Paul Smedley]

Yesterday I prepared a new topic in the forum. I started the topic like this, but as I am not English I had to think an check some words and sentences while typing. And I did some other things like watching the news on TV and even backed a bread. And before posting I even remember other facts to put into to message.
So, at last I had finished my "long" story and pressed the Post button.
What happened. Everything - EVERYTHING - was deleted with a message about that I had been on the function for more than an hour. As I remember it also said I had to log in. Stupid - I am always loged in. May be I am wrong about the login message, but anyway in my anger I broke a pencil and a few other not to mention things.
What about a little warning?

Probably a PHP setting relating to the length of a session...

[Martin Iturbide]

Would something like Lazarus will help with this kind of problems?
https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-recovery/

Sorry, I haven't tried it yet on Firefox OS/2.

[dbanet]

Timeouts are normal for this type of software, so there will be no solution forthcoming from that side of things.

Actually there are a lot of techniques, for example, a PHP script may save the post data in a memcache server, database entry, or a file with a random ID and then redirect the user to a login form with an URL containing a get parameter with the ID.
Or these can be done on the client side, like saving the form in a localStorage, or a cookie, or sending the form by AJAX, or logging in by AJAX, or simply hijaxing everything, etc, etc...

[Ben]

Hello, Boris.

Isn't AJAX Windows only? Can it be utilized by Firefox under OS/2?

I do not know, but maybe you do.

All I know is that this seems to be a persistent problem with the latest versions of SMForum. I have noticed this problem everywhere that uses the latest upgrades to it.

It did not exist in the past incarnation of OS/2 World, nor was the problem there on my own servers where I run several copies of it.

Now, that is just my own observations. It could be that something else we upgraded, (PHP for example), is causing this problem.

I have no doubt that it can be fixed and probably will be, but for now, it's an irritant.

BTW, I haven't had this problem since I installed the addon that Martin recommended, but neither have I made a long post, or had to walk away midstream... so the timeout would not have activated... just in case anyone is wondering.

However, it is only a matter of time. When what happens I'll post the results.

[dbanet]

Hi Ben,

Asynchronous Javascript And XML, AJAX shortly, is a very old technology, and is now supported by all major browsers, all major platforms, including out port of Firefox (even version 4), and QtWebKit (QupZilla, etc). You can check how that works by going to http://google.com/ and typing in your request, but don't press Enter. You will notice that the page will be instantly updated and the search results will be shown while you are typing. Also the search hints are loaded in background.

Asynchronous means that your browser performs an HTTP request without reloading the whole page.
The JS code on the page creates a special object XMLHttpRequest, which performs the HTTP request, and then it gets the response back from it.

I don't have the described above problem, but when I somehow lose the form text due to very bad-written web-application, I usually can recover it by clicking the History Back button (or pressing backspace, or using mouse gesture with All-In-One Gestures add-on for Firefox).

I mean, if there is something written very bad in the simplemachines forum, that's not a rule.

Regards.

[dbanet]

Actually, it was one time windows-only. Actually, not windows-only, but IE-only.

Microsoft developed an ActiveX feature for Internet Explorer, which included the support for the XMLHttpRequest object. That was around IE 5.5.

You had to create the object differently, like this:

Code: [Select]

var xhr=new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');or like this:

Code: [Select]

var xhr=new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');
But now Internet Explorer supports the W3C-standartized method:

Code: [Select]

var xhr=new XMLHttpRequest();
Anyway, there is no difference between these, and all the objects' methods and behavior are the same.

Is that what you wanted to hear?

[Joop]

I have the same problem. I'm native Dutch speaking and you want to put in information as correctly as possible and also I do jump from message to other pages for checking info. My settings are forever, but don't know what it does, after some time your out (forever hehe). The solution is already given. If I know that the answer will be difficult and long than I copy the complete message to the text editor, do all my stuff there and if ready log on again, go to the message, go to reply mode and copy the message back in.