Hi guys I have tried a number of times to critique short stories in the review room -only to find that while I have been busy working away-the computer's timed me out. I have tried to save my work by pressing the righthand button but, that doesn't give me the option to save/copy. This morning I have bookmarked it. But it does not reapear in the post I wish to send. Also; When I see other people's posts they critique the work in bold or coloured text and sometimes they have lines around the quote they're refering too, I have not been able to figure out how to do this. I use a broadband dongle, is that why I am timed out. As you can see computers are not one of my stonger points. Help!
Copy and paste text into Notepad and save it there. Anything written in a reply box on a forum is intransient and will vanish mysteriously as soon as you sneeze. I make it a habit to compulsively copy paste a lot of things before I hit post, just 'cause my internet is a bit crappy and sometimes decides not to load a page. I paste it in Notepad for safekeeping most of the time if I'm not certain I can get it posted to the forum in the next few minutes. Plus, when you paste it into Notepad, you know that it's copied properly - if nothing appears, then you know that you didn't pick it up before it becomes an issue that you didn't. use the options at the top of the reply box: for bolded text, to choose colours, etc. Use the to box quotes up aside from the rest of the text. And use to put images in. Oh! And the timing out could just be that you didn't set the forum to remember you forever and always? If it's not your internet going down, but just a message that you've been logged out because you timed out... Log out and then in again and set it to remember you and your password for as long as possible. Forums tend to time you out after 15 minutes/half an hour/a whole hour (depending) just 'cause it's good safety not to leave yourself logged in forever. BUT if you're the only one who uses the computer in question, you can do it and not be too worried.
One option is to write as first sentence of the reply: "If you can read this, this is just a partial save, so don't read further." And then you can constantly save and edit the post, so you always have it on the forum. Don't forget to remove the first line when you're finished.
Thanks Melzaar and Thamshin for your promp reply. Ain't I brilliant. I only need to be told once This is great fun
In addition to what is mentioned above, if you use Opera as your web browser you can right click on a web page and tell the browser to automatically reload the page at specified intervals. That may help with web sites timing you out.
And while if you accidentally go to another page, on most browsers you can go back and hit ctrl + z in the box to get the text back, if it's not already waiting for you, re-loading the page ditches it entirely, never to be seen. Handy thing, knowing that, though. OH! OH! I get it! Open another page of writing forums in another tab, and have it re-load THAT to stop you timing out while you make your reply! Oh! Another thing! Does the "Who's Online?" page auto-refresh!? It does on another vBulletin forum I'm on - if I'm using a public computer and don't want to time out, I just open that page in one tab and leave it to refresh for me while I write replies to stuff.
Ah...good point. So it may be useful to keep a web site from logging you out due to inactivity, but it won't save a message you are typing or anything like that. I agree with the recommendation above to use Wordpad (or my choice - Jarte).
