First things first, I disabled my ad blocker for this entire site, and I have tried with WYSIWYG editor and with the code visible. None of that has any effect.
I can reply to certain posts with quote, and others, nothing appears at all when I try that option. I type up messages with posts quoted that I have replied to, and I preview the message (have to, because of the board’s incredibly tiny edit window) and the entire message, the quotes, the text I typed, it all vanishes.
It makes it particularly difficult to respond to certain threads. Lots of my work vanishes or replying to people is impossible. Additionally, some posts with a quote are preview-able and then post-able, but once I do, if I try to edit the post within the window, the text all vanishes. Quotes and body.
The problem is intermittent but significant and persistent. It happens in most of the threads I’m active in, and most of the posts I try to respond to. It doesn’t happen all the time. Quotes seem to trigger it, but not always. I’m not touching the quotes most of the time. Just throwing quote tags around text I type myself causes the same issue, I believe it is the cause anyway. But because the problem is intermittent and doesn’t happen under the same sets of circumstances all the time, I can’t rule out the idea that it isn’t actually the quotes causing this.
Running Windows 8.1, Firefox as the browser.
Doesn’t happen on any other vBulletin board I frequent, just here.
I haven’t heard of that one before. You might want to check your computer for malware and maybe re-install Firefox. What version of Firefox are you running, by the way?
One thing you can do is edit your reply in a text editor (notepad or whatever) and then copy and paste it into the reply box when you are done. That way if it screws up, all you need to do is copy and paste it again and you won’t lose anything.
It says it is version 47.0.1, but it just updated itself to tell me that.
The copy to notepad method works, but when reply with quote doesn’t work, it makes the end result of cutting and pasting and linking back to the original post so ugly looking, and the additional steps are a bit tedious. I’d love it if I could just consistently get those quoted replies with the embedded links every time.
It also makes editing posts complicated since you can copy/paste and lose all your formatting in wordpad, and putting the formatting back in makes me miss the edit window sometimes.
I run malwarebytes and spybot, keep them updated and scan with both weekly, and this has been going on for longer than that. Was hoping me talking about it would cause someone else to say “yeah it happens to me too” so we can sort it out.
I tried a weird approach, I tried multi-quoting the messages I was having trouble replying to with quote, and they did not appear at all when I was ready to reply.
It’s like the board is simply forgetting that *any *text exists in certain posts, whether I’m replying to them, previewing, or editing them. Goes for my posts and other people’s posts, alike.
Askthepizzaguy - do you have something that causes your page to refresh, maybe?
The default hotkeys for refreshing the page in Firefox are F5 or CTRL+R. Is it possible that you might be accidentally typing CTRL+R instead of Shift+R sometimes, causing the page to refresh and your text to be lost?
Or maybe you have an extension that adds mouse gestures or tab behavior that causes refreshing when you’re not expecting it?
vBulletin allows for a limit to be put on the number of characters in a post… at the SDMB I believe this is set to 25,000. Maybe the quoting feature gets wonky around the limit?
That incredibly tiny edit window is infinitely large if you expand it using the triangle icon at the bottom right. Try it sometime. Or just use the advanced mode.
I’m running chrome on win 10 and can’t multi-quote. I also don’t see bolding or italics. But I probably set something in motion on chrome a few pcs ago and it remembers better than The North. Since I don’t use ad-block on FF I suppose I should give this site a try with it… but I only use that browser for Farmville 2 I’ll just keep pretending that I see the bolds or italics and if need be… hand code multi-quotes. I don’t argue enough to usually need that.
(We have a cockatoo and his powder down kills pcs… so I get a new one every 2 years. Shhh… My husband believes my pcs have died even when blowing them out nets him or one of the kids a new one. Sort of like how he “needs” new toys for his shop every 2 years or less (tire balancer, back hoe, dune buggy frame from 2 states away). It works for us.
Thanks for thinking about it a bit- but, no, I rarely refresh a page. However, if you preview a post, or the window changes going from reply with quote to the reply to thread window, text will vanish when the window changes.
And it doesn’t do it all the time. Here, I’m replying with quote and it worked this time. Now, it may work for a while or it may not, but (this is strange) certain posts, it won’t reply to at all. And the size of the post has no bearing on it. Well, I mean you can reply, but the post will be blank, and you’ll have to start all over.
Even for a post this size, responding to a quote this size, if I preview this message before posting it, sometimes it will vanish entirely. Or if I post it then try to edit it, poof, all the text disappears.
Doesn’t need to be a large post. And since it is intermittent, it’s particularly frustrating, because I can’t identify a cause that always makes it happen.
Edit: Testing the edit. Worked, this time. But experienced the error I described in about 5 separate posts the other day when replying to people.
I’ll just keep pretending that I see the bolds or italics and if need be… hand code multi-quotes. I don’t argue enough to usually need that.