Not that it's a huge problem, but at one time or another many of us have had to clean up, or apologize for, duplicate posts.
I'm sure there are different reasons, but wanted to pass along some observations, and a suggestion that has mostly eliminated the problem for me.
When a post fails, I usually see one of two error messages: either the specific one from the site saying that some files may be locked, try again in a few seconds, etc; or a more generic server timed out response from my browser.
Yet in nearly all of these cases (except when the Alembic site is really down or otherwise struggling), my post has actually been accepted.
What I usually do at such times is this:
- hit Back in my browser, to return to the screen where I was previewing the post.
- copy my post to the clipboard.
- hit Back another time or two, to see the thread I was posting to.
- hit Refresh, to see whether my post has actually appeared (almost always, it has, and I usually don't even need to Refresh).
- if not, then I paste into the posting area and try again.
If it's something really long that I don't want to have to rewrite, I may take the extra conservative step of temporarily saving my post in a text file. In fact, for longer ones I usually do my editing there first (sometimes even do some spellchecking...), and then just copy the whole thing over, which also makes it easier to keep up with what others might be saying while I'm sitting here scratching my head.
Again, the main point is that most of the time, it really hasn't failed, so it's worth taking a look. I've had two of these in the last day, one locked message and one timed out, and though I went through the precautionary steps to avoid losing my work, both posts had actually made it there.
-Bob
(Message edited by bob on November 27, 2006)
