< User:SOTO | Forum Archive | The Drax Cave
One of the disadvantages of the forum code is that if you move away from a page where you are composing a new reply — maybe you accidentally click a link on the page, for example — it will appear as though you've lost the message you're composing.
But there is a way to save it!
- Click your back button. You should see one line of your text in the entry box at the bottom of the page.[1] Do not click on the entry box, or your text will be lost.
- Immediately hit ⌘-A on your Mac or ctrl-A on other, inferior operating systems. This will select the text of the entire page.
- Then hit ⌘-C on your Mac or ctrl-C if you're lumbered with another OS.
- Open up TextEdit on Macs or Notepad in Widoze.
- Hit ⌘-V on your Mac or ctrl-V on your cut-price, cut-corners competitor. This will then dump the entire contents of the Thread into your text editor.
- Find the text for your "lost" post, then copy and paste it back into the thread.
It's a bit cumbersome, sure. And it would be better if the Forum mini-editor worked more like the regular page editor, allowing you to navigate away from and back to your edits with ease. But at least there's some way to recover a post, when you accidentally navigate away from it.
- ↑ When you return to the Thread page, you must be able to see a line of your text in the text-entry area. If you don't see that, this method won't work. This method only recovers posts that have been lost due to navigating away from the Thread page.