I had spent probably 30 minutes composing a brilliantly witty thread-starting post* in IMHO about the Senate and the Supreme Court, and suddenly the letters I was typing stopped appearing on the screen, and after a few seconds I was suddenly back at the IMHO forum main page.
I’m too tired to try it again tonight, and my wit is not something I can turn on at will, so the quality if I try again will probably be somewhat below par. Blame the board software, not me.
*Believe me, it was the best. Take my word for it.
So what do folks think happened to my post? Bit bucket? Why?
My guess, you accidentally clicked out of the text box (or something weird happened under the hood that made it lose focus), and then you happened to hit backspace at some point after that. Your browser still has backspace mapped to the “Back” button. (Chrome removed it for exactly that reason.)
If so, pushing the forward button might have gotten you back where you were, but it’s probably too late for that, now.
Or use a browser extension such as the Lazarus plugin for Firefox or Chrome, which saves text typed into forms or message board textboxes as you type and in the result of a browser or computer crash can be instantly recovered. Textarea Cache for Firefox does the same job.
Anything long I do as text with another program and then cut and paste after I log in here. I regularly get (what I call) timed out and either bumped from “reply” or bumped all the way off and having to log in again. Either way 90% of the time I lose whatever I was typing. It can happen to me any time but most often when I have logged in and not replied to anything – my first reply is a long one.
I type really fast (100 typos per minute), and I used to get a bulk erase due to some combination of keys I hit with my pinkie knuckle, like Shift-Control-Down arrow, or something, I never figured out what combination did it. Only on my old desktop keyboard, never happens on my laptop. To defend against that, I would sometimes type a few paragraphs and post it, then go to edit and do a few more paragraphs. Thanks to the miracle of the 5-minute edit window, that is impossible here…
A fairly easy one would be Ctrl-A, which selects all, and then you keep on typing and it types over it. But I don’t think that would be too easy with a pinkie knuckle.
Also common way to do what the OP did would be to accidentally hit Tab and then hit backspace.
And, yeah, I recommend those types of extensions, too. If you’re worried about them having too much data, you can usually set them to delete it after a certain period of time.
Also, for your case, don’t forget about Ctrl-Z, which will undo your most recent bits of typing. And you can keep using it. If you go too far and undo something you want to keep, press Ctrl-Y.
