I just saw a post enquiring about testing Canon AI Servo focus operation. So I prepared a response which took me half an hour including research. When I clicked "Send Message" I got "no such post, can't find it". Sure enough when I went looking for it I couldn't find it anywhere.
Does the moderator regularly remove messages, or do people often delete their own messages? Or is the software flaky?
I'm a bit irritated at wasting half an hour and want to know if this is something I need to expect often.
Julian
Edited by jrsubs on Feb 02, 2008 at 01:42 PM GMT (Reason: ypo)
That still wouldn't have solved my problem though - spending good time to find at the end that the original post is gone. My question really is "do posts disappear often, either for technical or people reasons?".
EB-1 wrote:
The FM forum software can indeed be flaky. I suggest writing long posts in a word processor and then pasting the text into the reply box.
EB
It's much more likely that the OP deleted it, rather than a forum glitch. Fred gives everyone the option of being able to delete their own posts, but it's something we really shouldn't do unless it's an extreme situation.
EB is right...if it's that important to you, type it in a word processor then cut/paste in to a post.
Threads do not get deleted like this. It's very likely the OP deleted his own post. I'm thinking on a fix for this. For example if a thread has a number "x" of posts, the OP would not be able to delete his first post anymore. Only edit it...
Thanks. This one was a mystery because it wasn't a contentious post, not the sort of thing you might want to delete after some sensible thought. It was a first post, no responses so your proposed change wouldn't have helped me here. Anyway thanks for the info.
Scott- as I said working in a wp doesn't save me from wasting significant time which is what concerned me. The only thing that would have helped is if I had checked back every 5 minutes while doing my research to check that the OP was still there.
PS I just noticed that under "my posts" it shows the missing topic and indicates that my reply was received even though the moment I clicked "Post" it told me the message had disappeared. If I click on it in "my posts" it still says the message(s) are gone. Strange.
There have been some terrible deletions of posts that ran to many tens, and even hundreds of pages. It really shouldn't be possible for the thread starter to delete everyone else's comments. It's very easy to disable it, but the question is, how we introduce the thread once the OP has gone. I don't see why it shouldn't just read: "The original post has been deleted".
One other feature that I think is fairly urgent, btw, and which i will work on, is more info than the thread subject in the board listing of threads. People routinely use very uninformative subjects, (ahem), and it's quite annoying. In the case of this thread, it's lucky it's so interesting, or else I would have been annoyed by the content-opaque subject. I might write a bit of code which shows the 5 longest words from the OP content in order, after the subject itself. We could even allow thread visitors to vote on whether such a précis should be shown instead of the original subject...
Sorry about the subject! It's just that I couldn't think of a succinct way of saying it in a heading and I thought it was a fairly one-topic forum. I'll do better next time
BTW the deleted thread STILL shows up in my "recent posts by jrsubs" screen, but of course when I click it says can't be found. Is this normal behaviour - shouldn't it be deleted everywhere in whatever database it is stored?
I suggest writing long posts in a word processor and then pasting the text into the reply box.