…and I can’t get back to the Message Board. I get the message that what I posted might be evaluated by a Mod; be patient, etc., and I return to my message. Clicking the back arrow only brings me back to my message again (and again and again). If I click ‘I don’t want to wait anymore’ (sic) I still return to my message.
I usually exit and re-enter SD but the New Posts are gone since I supposedly read them on my last trip.
Help!
and doesn’t it drive you crazy?
But help is at hand. You may safely chill.
My understanding is that once you’ve got that little message your post is safely lodged, and you can gambol off into other posts to wreak more havoc - excuse me - that’s judging others by my own standards - ahem, to lodge more carefully considered arguments, and present further compelling evidence in a variety of arenas.
I use my “back” button and get into the last search results frame and charge ahead from there, using the forum jump button to get around as well. You cats love to stray, I believe…
BUT If it was a post I felt very much in love with, I sometimes do a copy and paste into a word processing document before I go, just in case.
I don’t trust computers. Still nostalgic for quills, actually.
Redboss
Oh, okay, I see what you’re talking about. You’re not talking about “trust the CGI”, when it hangs on the “Thank you for posting” window, due to slow server speed. You’re talking about after you’ve posted, and you’re sitting there staring at your post, wondering how you get back to the forum?
Up at the top of each thread, it says Straight Dope Message Board > General Questions > Why is my cat vomiting? or whatever. At the top of each forum, it says just Straight Dope Message Board > General Questions or whatever. Those are all blue/maroon links (well, except for the thread title, which is black). Click on them to get back to the forum you want, and clicking on the Straight Dope Message Board link brings you back to the Main forums page, where it describes each forum.
You can also use the Forum Jump at the bottom of each page.
Or you can use the History–Today folder to get where you want to go, especially to a particular thread. It’ll be under “B” for “boards.straightdope”. And if you want to get back to Page 2 of a forum, look for the relevant URL in the History folder that has “page2” way, way down at the tag end of the URL.
And for future reference, like Redboss said, if you ever have a really long important post that you just spent two hours composing, with links and everything, for heaven’s sake Copy and Paste it into WordPad or Notepad before you try to post it. The Straight Dope CGI can catch it in a twinkling, no problem, but only if MSN or AOL doesn’t cut you off in mid-click.
My problem here is that I take so long composing a reply sometimes, that MSN disconnects me from the Internet. Then, when I click on Submit, it has to go through the whole reconnection process, which brings up the MSN Home Page instead of my Straight Dope Reply window, and my glorious post has vanished into the ether.
As long as we’re on the subject, I’ve had similar disappearances using Hotmail. When I get a reply email and click on the link, it opens up a new window with a Hotmail banner at the top. If I’m dumb (and patient) enough to post to the thread I’ve just opened during the slow hours of the day, it’ll most likely time out, giving me some sort of URL error screen. With a regular IE window, I could just hit the back arrow and get back to my composed post, but with the Hotmail window, it comes up as ‘error’ and the back button becomes useless. If I was too dumb not to back up my post, then I’m SOL. I had this happen twice before figuring it out. Now I can get around it, but damn if it’s not yet another reason to hate Hotmail. :mad:
[sub]DDG–TWO hours composing a post???[/sub]
straykat, if you’re using IE, you can click on the “down arrow” next to the “Back” button and it’ll show you a dropdown list of recent pages. You can use that to go back to the forum list you were at before you read and posted to Thread X. I expect Netscape has a similar feature.
It does.
In Netscape, you can right click on the back button and a list like kat describes will appear.
I stopped understanding this thread during the fourth paragraph of Duck Duck Goose’s post.
Goddammit, where’s my quill?
Redboob
Hey, it took me two hours to write that, the least you could do is read it! 