…but my alternative is to wait five minutes to see if my “Web Page Not Found” error means that my post really vanished, or if it actually got to the server even though the server failed to respond.
Often, I don’t mind doing just that. Indeed, if the post failed the first time, I often take the time to revise it before hitting submit again. This is, I think, the only salutary effect of an otherwise frustrating experience. If I have to shut down and leave, I either hit submit again, or lose my deathless prose.
It’s also frustrating when the board just sits there, even if I’m browsing and not posting.
Is there any hope of a fix down the oine somewhere?
My experience has been that if you click Submit, even if you get the “Page Not Found” message, your post still went through. Even if you never see the “thank you for posting” message. When you get “Page Not Found” the server just couldn’t find the page on which your new post was placed; doesn’t mean the post didn’t make it onto the page. So I’d say if you come across that error message, just hit refresh to reload the thread and see if your post is there.
When you Submit, and after waiting for your hair to grow a couple inches, you finally get the “Cannot Find Server” “The Page Cannot Be Displayed” message, just hit the Back button–your wonderful reply will still be there, hanging in eternal hamster limbo in the Reply window, right where you left it. Then use Preview to see whether it showed up. I do this all the time. As a matter of fact, I did it just now, several times, in fact.
It USED to be that once you hit Submit, your post would go through nevertheless, but I’ve noticed lately that along with the increasing number of disappearing OPs, we seem to have more incidences of posts not going through nevertheless.
How I long for the day when the SDMB moves up to a team of meerkats running the server…
I never wanted to be a double-poster either–I always thought it would MUCH cooler to be a four-poster
Hm, whenever I’ve done that, all I’ve seen is a blank screen. Maybe it depends on where you’re actually posting, whether it’s the Quick Reply box at the bottom of the thread or the screen you go to when you hit “Post a Reply”.
Oooo, I agree that this is normally the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. When things seem to be running slowly, I usually take the precaution of highlighting all the text of my reply and hitting CTRL+C to copy it to the clipboard. That way, if something goes wrong and I need to re-submit, I can just hit CTRL+V and paste it.