Last Post (FAO: Brad)

[John E]

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?

[Brad Jones]

Joe -

Can you get this reinstated please.

Thanks,

Brad!

[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

[John E]

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?

[JPnyc]

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.

[dglienna]

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.

[John E]

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.

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!!

[JPnyc]

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.

[dglienna]

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

[John E]

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).

[cilu]

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.

[Arjay]

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.

[John E]

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

[Arjay]

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

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.

[dglienna]

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...