Last Post (FAO: Brad)

Hi Brad - I don't know if you'll remember this - but a few years ago, CG went through a phase where it would often crash, just at the stage where a user was posting - or even just previewing a post.

Someone took a look into it but never found the problem - so you implemented a workaround. The workaround was a link (or a button, or something) saying "last post". If CG crashed whilst posting, I could re-boot, come back to CG and press the "last post" link, instead of having to type my entire post all over again.

Anyways.... the last post button disappeared some time ago - but the crashing problem didn't. It's a lot less frequent now than it used to be, but it is still there.

Would it be a lot of trouble to reinstate that old "Last Post" feature?

Joe -

Can you get this reinstated please.

Thanks,

Brad!

we removed the feature because some userswho post from work did not want evidence of what they post on their work machines. In addition, we weren't having loading problems like we used to, so the feature was deemed unnecessary. Thanks

Well I guess that's understandable but believe me, it's very frustrating when you've spent 6 or 7 minutes typing up a reply to someone's post, only to lose it all and have to type the whole lot all over again.

Could it be reinstated as a profile option? i.e. something that users could enable or disable in their profile settings?

that would take quite a bit of doing. I think we would be better served trying to eliminate the failure to load issue. Can you tell me how often this is happening to you and what the symptoms are? Please give as much info as possible, browser, OS, etc. Whether or not there are any visible error messages, thanks.

I always use NOTEPAD to write a post, if I think it will take some time. I also go back and edit it often until I'm done.

I must admit, I've taken to saving my posts into a Word document before I hit CG's "submit" or "preview" button. It's annoying to have to do this but ironically, the mere fact of doing it seems to act as some kind of "insurance" against the crash. Maybe it's just "sods law" but the crash never happens if I've pasted and saved my post somewhere else. :confused:

FWIW I've only ever had this problem with Internet Explorer. Mostly I use Windows XP but when I first encountered it, I think it used to also happen with Win2K.

A year ago I changed my browser to Safari but it was a PITA and eventually, it completely stopped working (even a re-install wouldn't cure it). So I've had to go back to IE again.

I guess the crash happens about twice each week. There's no error message. My whole machine simply locks up (becomes unresponsive) and I have to press the reset button. Annoyingly, the longer it takes to type the response, the more likely it is that the lock up will occur!! :cry:

anyone else experiencing this? It sounds like a local problem. Just a quick control-A., control-c as soon as you finish typing would be a quick and easy solution, without needing an external editor.

Never crashes when you're finished. Always in the middle...

Yes. CTRL-A plus CTRL-C wouldn't be much help because the data will still be lost when you reboot.

FWIW there's one other site, called Friends Reunited (.co.uk) which crashes my system in a very similar way. It has a facility for finding old school friends by typing in their name and clicking a 'Search' button. But as soon as I click the button (using IE8/WinXP) my machine invariably locks up. If I try the same thing with IE6/Win2K, Explorer crashes (though thankfully, not Win2k) amd just before the crash I see a message dialog saying "Virtual function call". The main difference is that these crashes are 100 percent repeatable - not random, like with CG.

Interestingly, if I visit the FR page using FireFox/Linux, it all works but is slow and dreadfully klunky (not unlike Safari, when I was using it under XP). :cry:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JPnyc

we removed the feature because some userswho post from work did not want evidence of what they post on their work machines. In addition, we weren't having loading problems like we used to, so the feature was deemed unnecessary. Thanks

---

What about the cookies? The history? Aren't those proof too? They can use Google Chrome's Incognito mode or IE8's Private Browsing. That doesn't write anything to disk.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by John E

But as soon as I click the button (using IE8/WinXP) my machine invariably locks up. If I try the same thing with IE6/Win2K, Explorer crashes (though thankfully, not Win2k) amd just before the crash I see a message dialog saying "Virtual function call".

---

XP? Win2K?

What? Time to upgrade to Win7 and get out of the stone age. :D

Arjay - feel free to read my rant on the subject of OS upgrades :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by John E

Arjay - feel free to read my rant on the subject of OS upgrades :D

---

Microsoft definitely wouldn't cripple software.

I'm really not one of those "got to have the latest [hardare/software] guys", but I do feel that a developer needs to stay somewhat current.

I never upgraded to Vista because, I was doing more server type development and some of the software I needed for development wouldn't run on Vista so I've been running on Win2K3 server until a few months ago although I had been running IE8.

For development environments, it's a whole different story. I always run the latest so I have VS 2008 installed as well as 2005. I'll move to VS 2010 when it's released to. I really don't understand folk that use the older dev environments like VC6. I used to try to convince folks like that that the new env is more compliant, has more debugging or ide features and so on, but I don't anymore - I feel you either get it or you don't.

I can tell you with certainty that Microsoft doesn't have some sort of master plan that breaks software to get you to upgrade. For the most part they do a fantastic job. Sometimes, they don't always get it right (i.e. Vista), but those are because of incorrect assumptions or poor decisions, not because of some intentional plan.

They did a lot of planning and testing building Net 4.0 so that it wouldn't break things. Things will work that used to work. That's a big thing...

To Microsoft's credit, backwards compatibility has always been high on its list of priorities - which isn't something you can say about Apple. And yet I've definitely noticed that its OS's and browsers do seem to grow increasingly unreliable over time, which isn't something I've observed with its other applications, such as Word or Excel. Having said that, I can tell by the lack of response to that post that this must be something unique to me. :cry:

The VC6/VC8 thing that Arjay mentioned is more complex though. When I first started using VC++ I used MFC exclusively. But these days, one can't afford to ignore other platforms and that means having to look at alternative GUI technologies, such as QT, GTK or wxWidgets. Gone are the days when these (equally cumbersome) technologies needed to be built from source. The open source library community has (finally) embraced the practice of doing it "the Microsoft way" and providing developers with pre-built library packages c/w header files.

But if my experience is anything to go by, the pre-built Win32 binaries are invariably behind the times and are rarely compatible with anything later than VC6 or (increasingly now) VC8. So one has to retain those older compilers or use kludgy gcc tools such as MinGW or Cygwin. :( It's a tricky choice - but on balance, give me Microsoft developer tools any day!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JPnyc

we removed the feature because some userswho post from work did not want evidence of what they post on their work machines. In addition, we weren't having loading problems like we used to, so the feature was deemed unnecessary. Thanks

---

You mean because they are not allowed to post from office? I think if that's the case then they really shouldn't be posting from office. Or in the worst case, they should know where that file gets stored and should be able to go and delete that file manually.

Disabling a useful feature from CG or for that matter any other website for such a reason doesn't seem like a good justification. But I might not be knowing all the details that you/CG might have had while taking the decision. Just a thought.

I must admit, I agree with the above. If company policy forbids them to use sites like CodeGuru, then they shouldn't use them - or get ther company policy changed.

JPync - you're absolutely right to say that it would be better to devote some time to tracking down the reasons for the crash but that was the view, last time. Unfortunately, the crash was never repeatable enough to be reproducible. For example, it hasn't happened to me at all during the past week. And yet other times, it'll happen 2 or 3 times per day. My guess is that a lot probably depends on the site loading (i.e. number of users online) so it's never going to be a simple problem to track down. Someone will probably discover the reason by accident one day. Until then, do we just have to put up with it?

I noticed some slowness in the typing of the recent few messages here as well. The longer the text goes, the slower it happens. (speed at which I see the letters appear on the message text box than the typing). I am using IE8, Vista Ultimate (all with latest updates) and mostly I use the Quick Reply option. I was fearing IE would crash and hence did the Cntl-A, Cntl-C trick - wasn't needed but still... :)

Could have been some add on those specific previous pages (as am not getting that felt for this message) and the CPU usage had temporarily gone 100%. It's ok now without a crash though.