I've had this happen to, also after long delays in actually posting. It seems as if there is an expiration date on the posting box.

I added a link to Natter 2 to the last post in Natter 1.

Hrm, did we ever figure out a way to add a link to the BuffistaCorp cafepress site?

From where?

Don't know how long you spent composing before posting. But if there is no activity, your login expires after 30 minutes. That is not a bug, and not something that can be worked around since it is set at the server level. (Actually it could be worked around by using regular cookies rather than session variable; then you could control the timeout. Since this would basically mean completely rewriting secuity, I doubt there would ever be a reason to do this. This is one of those things that sometimes gets me in trouble. I make a statement, then realize it is not strictly true because of an exception - and point out the exception to just for completenesses sake. )

CaBil, there's one in the header of the BuffistaCorp thread. There might also be one in links. Where else are you thinking of?

The problem with the thread header here is that it only appears on the first page. On TT, the thread header appeared on every page, so when you needed the links in the thread header, they were always right there. Now here, most of the links that used to be in the headers are in the sidebar, but if you have thread specific links, like CafePress, then they get lost. Should we repeat the thread header on every page, as TT did?

Don't know how long you spent composing before posting. But if there is no activity, your login expires after 30 minutes. That is not a bug, and not something that can be worked around since it is set at the server level. (Actually it could be worked around by using regular cookies rather than session variable; then you could control the timeout. Since this would basically mean completely rewriting secuity, I doubt there would ever be a reason to do this. This is one of those things that sometimes gets me in trouble. I make a statement, then realize it is not strictly true because of an exception - and point out the exception to just for completenesses sake. )

The first thing about this is that I don't think most people know that the session expires after a certain amount of time, and that if you try to post after that time, you will get an error. Even if we decide not to do anything about it, we need to advise people to be aware of the problem, and so they won't be surprised when it happens.

The big problem with this feature is that if you're using any browser but Opera, you can't go back and recover whatever was in the posting box. Since one of the conditions most likely to trigger this problem is the composing of a very long post, this is not good. I realize that it may be good practice to compose long posts in a text editor, and then copy them into the posting box, but it's not a very user friendly solution.

I think all you would have to do, in the event the session has expired, is to have the system look for the 'Remember me' cookie on the client computer, and if it's there, start another session. If the cookie isn't there, then offer the login screen to start another session. I don't know how difficult all this would be, but the situation as it stands right now just isn't very satisfactory.

OK that is a good point. A warning would not hurt. And attempting a relog if the post fails - yeah that might not be a heavy rewrite; at least it could be considered. I am pretty sure that you could get expirations in WX if you took too long to compose your post. It did try to log you back in; I don't remember this ever allow a post to go through successfully.

The only times I remember having problems posting with WX was when it was being wonky in other ways, as well, but I've always used the remember me feature, so it wouldn't have had to stop to put up the login page. I do know that others lost posts when WX wasn't being wonky. But with WX you could usually go back a page and retrieve the post.

Actually, I'm still more curious as to why the back (and forward) buttons don't work the way they're supposed to. On WX, if you just go back to the cached page. On the Phoenix, it always (except in Opera) treats it as a new page view, which has to have an effect on our bandwidth usage.

I realize that it may be good practice to compose long posts in a text editor, and then copy them into the posting box, but it's not a very user friendly solution.

What I've been doing, if I'm writing a long post, is copying it to the clipboard before I hit "post," so that if something does get messed up, I've still got it on my computer. Not as annoying as having to open a text editor.