I am a newbie here and composed a long detailed post requesting help and just lost it because a URL was in it.
Please warn people that this will happen I will try to recompose my questions and re-post later when I have time

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Website Suggestions&Feedback, and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

hiya SPACE_OG- Welcome to LQ!
I'm sorry that happened- but the move is there to stop spammers- those who just sign up and post a link. you need 5 posts before you can post a link- blantant advertisment of this fact would make it null. this isn't really a hurdle for legitimate users- you should get 5+ posts in no time- (not that you should post crap to bump your post count)

You should always copy really long posts so it remains in you're computer's memory- even pasting it to a text document helps.

jeremy- this hasn't happened to me, so I dunno- is there an option where they can go back and remove the link?

SPACE_OG- you mean you couldn't go "back"?

titanium_geek

There should have been a large red warning with the following at the top of the new post page:

"Sorry, in order to post a URL you must have at least 5 posts. This measure was put into place to prevent spamming. Please remove the URL and try again. Posting extra threads to get around this rule will result in all threads being removed."

Was that not there?

--jeremy

To titanium and jeremy, Thanks for the concerned replies. Yes the read notice was there but it could make the user aware that the text is lost in that case as well.

Also yes I tried to go "back" but the text was lost.

Thanks again

What browser do you use? I never have any problems clicking back when I get errors on online forms and text areas, not losing anything I've just typed. I use Firefox and Opera 99.999% of the time.

Browsers have different ways of functioning though, LQ tries to make the rules clear and what might happen and can't be responsible if your browser stores the info from a prevoius page or not.

Firefox looses everything 100% of the time at every forum I visit when I hit the back button. Maybe its something to do with the way my settings are?

Konqueror does well in going back and having saved the typed text.
Maybe you cache is disabled?

Doesn't happen with my version 1.0.7 on Slackware. Actually, never happens on any version I used from what I remember.

My system is fine - it always remembers the posts I have typed if I hit 'back'.

Why not go around this problem with cache by providing a textarea along with the warning that contains the submitted text? That way you do not need to go back, just edit the text and re-press submit.

Why build code to circumvent a lack of training?

We're rethinking the 5 post URL implementation for the forum redesign - stay tuned.

--jeremy

Why not? Those people will most certainly not learn anything just because we do not build this code, so why not get rid of those complains so we can keep focus on more important stuff? I see no harm in building code to prevent loss of text. People can forget to copy the text before submitting, maybe his/her browser does not save the text and I do not think that we will encurage people to be lazy just because of this extra code. It will not make us more Microsoftish, IMHO, just nicer to people who have just registered at LQ.

Or lack of reading, or lack of following the rules, or expecting to be spoon-fed answers when clicking on the search link above would get the answer right away. . .