Why do thread titles I've typed or copied in sometimes vanish while I'm working on the text of the message?

[highplainsdem]

It doesn't always happen, or even happen fairly often. But sometimes it happens so quickly that I can't finish writing a short message or just copying in an excerpt and link from an article the thread title mentions before that title vanishes and I have to redo it.

Never happened with DU3.

[intrepidity]

1. I've had that happen too, sometimes

After I hit "post" it will say I need to add title, which I knew I did, but it vanished.

[highplainsdem]

2. It can be especially frustrating if the title was a short sentence and part of a second, with the

text starting partway through that second sentence. If you've added enough text of your own and copied enough excerpts, you might no longer remember the exact words you started with that fit in the limits of the thread title. Redoing the thread title if it's just an article title is easy by comparison.

[usonian]

3. I think it might happen when the page is refreshed,

Last edited Fri Jun 14, 2024, 02:39 PM - Edit history (1)

either intentionally, or returning to a tab after a visit to some other tab.

As I do when looking for a quote or image, or just more text.

Not sure why and when this happens.

Haven't tried making the tab a separate window.

Heavens to Murgatroyd if you accidentally hit the back-arrow, and then return to your post.
Text you typed usually comes back, but I recall instances of it disappearing.

I use the ghosttext extension on browsers, but it's a bit techy to set up.
It mirrors your typing in a text editor, which preserves text "forever", but you have to re-enable it after a preview (which then gives you a versioning setup)

On edit, I noticed: “copying in an excerpt”


Since the browser maintains the text field, there may be some magic that goes on when you return to that tab (as I suspect happened to me). Might have to do with memory management in the browser. I have seen text disappear from a field when I select a range, and letting go of the mouse or finger accidentally selects everything but what I intended, and replaces it, or pastes over it.

Biggest goof I ever made was using a GUI editor on a config file instead of “vi”. Missed a totally impossible semicolon. Can’t reasonably do it here.

[EarlG]

4. Weird... I have no idea

I'm aware that there's sometimes an issue with post titles not being re-populated if you hit preview or go to another page, and then hit "back" to go back to your post.

However, I've never heard of titles disappearing while you're on the same page. There's nothing in our code that I'm aware of that could make that happen.

To explain: When you go to post, your browser receives data from our server when the post page initially loads, and sends data to our server when you submit the form, by either previewing or posting. But aside from that, no data is being sent to or from the server while you're just sitting on the post page typing into the form. So there's no mechanism to make a post title disappear.

That's not to say it can't be done. I could definitely create this effect by forcing text to disappear from an input box after a certain amount of time -- but to do so would require some very specific coding at our end, which does not exist (because that functionality would be of no use to anybody).

All that said, it could still be something at our end. I'd be curious to know if anyone else has experienced this. But given the above, my initial speculation is that it's device specific and this is something to do with your personal configuration. Maybe ad blocker/content blocker/privacy settings of some kind?

Edited to add: I see some people have experienced something similar, but I wonder if we're all talking about the same thing. To be clear, refreshing a post page while you're in the middle of a post, or leaving the page and then using the "Back" button to get back to it, can definitely cause the title field on the post page to be reset. But I'm unfamiliar with the issue occurring if you never leave the page. Do you literally see it just vanish before your eyes while you're typing?

[highplainsdem]

5. I notice it when I preview what I'm working on, so apparently it's the "titles not being re-populated" issue you

mentioned. I hadn't checked closely enough to see if the title vanished before I previewed.