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This site's post editing software is atrocious.

Agrippa

Pro Adventurer
I've been attempting to edit a post of mine, but my browser crashed undoing all the editing I made. I lost all the progress I made all because this forum's post editing is fundamentally different from its posting. This site doesn't make backups for post edits like other sites do, which makes no sense to me at all. Why bother editing a post if all additional progress can be wiped in the blink of an eye?!
 

Fangu

Great Old One
It does though. Backup, I mean. But it's probably stored in some cookie or whatnot, which doesn't help if your browser is being a dick. Try a different browser? I know it's a 'have you tried turning it off and on again' advice but the things you're experiencing shouldn't happen.
 

Agrippa

Pro Adventurer
It does though. Backup, I mean. But it's probably stored in some cookie or whatnot, which doesn't help if your browser is being a dick. Try a different browser? I know it's a 'have you tried turning it off and on again' advice but the things you're experiencing shouldn't happen.
I'm using Mozilla Firefox, if that's any help.
 

Rydeen

In-KWEH-dible
Firefox compatibility is super fucky in the industry right now, but as a stubborn Firefox user I've never had any issues with TLS. Try clearing cookies and cache? If first party cookies are disabled, enable them.
 

Agrippa

Pro Adventurer
Firefox compatibility is super fucky in the industry right now, but as a stubborn Firefox user I've never had any issues with TLS. Try clearing cookies and cache? If first party cookies are disabled, enable them.
That doesn't help me at all! I don't know what to do. I started editing a post of mine to add more details and then the browser froze on me before I could save any of it. Now it's just gone, and now I have to do it all over again, and I HATE that! I shouldn't have to type and re link everything I did second time, I just shouldn't.
 

Ⓐaron

Factiō Rēpūblicāna dēlenda est.
AKA
The Man, V
This won’t help recover your missing post, but I recommend some sort of form recovery software like Lazarus to prevent issues like this from occurring in the future. Also try disabling the WYSIWYG editor if you’re experiencing browser crashes. It’s that gear icon at the top-right of the post editing toolbar. I’ve got it disabled on most machines because I find it to be fairly unstable, and I really don’t care for finding smilies on that long-ass list. :capmon:
 

Rydeen

In-KWEH-dible
That doesn't help me at all! I don't know what to do. I started editing a post of mine to add more details and then the browser froze on me before I could save any of it. Now it's just gone, and now I have to do it all over again, and I HATE that! I shouldn't have to type and re link everything I did second time, I just shouldn't.

You're right, you shouldn't. It's a forum feature.

Just follow this, restart the program, and type out a random string of letters as a response to a thread, then leave the page and come back to see if it saved.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/k...d-history-firefox#w_how-do-i-clear-my-history
 

Agrippa

Pro Adventurer
You're right, you shouldn't. It's a forum feature.

Just follow this, restart the program, and type out a random string of letters as a response to a thread, then leave the page and come back to see if it saved.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/k...d-history-firefox#w_how-do-i-clear-my-history
I'm not talking about a reply in a thread, I'm talking about edits to a post of mine that just got deleted by this site's awful software. And by that I mean the edits, not the entire post.
 

Fangu

Great Old One
Huh, interesting. Edits might not be temporarily saved the same way as new posts - I have no idea.
 

Lex

Administrator
At the risk of sounding like a disgruntled admin - or worse, defensive - we are on Xenforo which is objectively decent forum software and is used by some of the top gaming boards online.

I don't think Xen supports drafts/ autosaving of posts while using the edit function. But to form some perspective, the vast majority of boards (vB, phpBB, Discourse etc) don't allow drafts or post-saving at all. At the very least, Xen does that with normal posts/ replies.

The solution you seek is - as far as I can tell - only provided by third party software (such as Lazarus). And for the record, if you're filling in a form and the page refreshes and you lose that data, that's a browser thing, not a forum software thing.
 

Rydeen

In-KWEH-dible
This is one of the few websites that doesn't give me any issues on FF at this point. :monster: I feel like my edits have been cached in the past, but I'm not really sure.

EDIT: Nope, I just tested it and it didn't autosave my edit. The changes have to be either saved through a different mechanism or committed.
 

Eerie

Fire and Blood
Yeah I've never seen a forum board saving an edit of a post that you didn't save? Like, even reddit doesn't do it, so? The site also never crashed my Firefox either, and I have MANY tabs opened. In fact I hadn't have Firefox crash on me since uh... YEARS? So it's odd to me, maybe you have an addon that makes it unstable?
 

Ⓐaron

Factiō Rēpūblicāna dēlenda est.
AKA
The Man, V
XenForo is definitely nicer than a lot of the other forum software out there I’ve used. It’s missing a couple of amenities that the old vBulletin had, but I think (but can’t remember for sure) that some of those were probably hacks we installed, and I know a lot of them (e.g., all the custom font formatting that users could customise posts with) were template edits that I instated myself, which I gather no one bothered to reinstate. (And some of the hacks are replicated by features that appear to be native to XenForo, like the post like system.*)

I think modern versions of phpBB may allow users to save drafts of posts, but they have to do that manually, and it doesn’t save some of the formatting; moreover, I don’t know if it allows users to save drafts of post edits. vBulletin definitely doesn’t allow saving of posts, or at least it didn’t in version 3.8.x, which was the last version I found to have a usable admin control panel, and that was ages ago.

It’s possible someone’s made an “auto-save post edits” hack for XenForo; I have certainly not gone through and looked to see what the XenForo modding community looks like. It probably wouldn’t be super difficult to simply steal a lot of the code from the base board software and adapt it for auto-saving post edits as well. But as a relatively experienced coder/admin, I can say that every time you mod a board, you run the risk of breaking something somewhere else. It requires a lot of testing and maintenance to mod board software, which is one reason admins are often suspicious of modding their boards too much.

I definitely have a lot fewer complaints with how this thing works than I’d have with modern versions of vBulletin (or older, less bloated versions of vBulletin, for that matter). It runs pretty smoothly and it’s got most of the features I’d want from a message board software – the ability to load new posts automatically is nice, and it’s got a really good notification system.

I wouldn’t object to a feature that automatically saves edits, but I suspect it would be most practical for the XenForo developers to make it themselves for a future version of the software; they undoubtedly have much better resources to test their own software than any third-party modder would.

One other thing I would add is that if you spend that long editing a post, it might be worth just making a new one. Double-posting is frowned upon in some circumstances, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. If you’re the last person to post in a thread, people probably won’t object to double posting as long as the new post is substantive and long enough has elapsed since the previous one. (In other words, if you’re just double-posting because you’re too lazy to figure out/use the multi-quote function, people will yell at you; if you’re double-posting because you’ve got a thousand words to add to something you already wrote, people won’t care.)

Anyway, for now, just use Lazarus or some similar software to save your edits, or save them in a text document as Ghost suggested. It’s kind of annoying that it takes third-party software to get that functionality, but I don’t know of any other message board software that would have that functionality either, and if any does, it’s probably got its own drawbacks. No software is perfect, since it’s developed by humans, who are intrinsically not perfect.

*…though I’m still moderately annoyed that none of the old thanks were imported as likes, since it means I need to go to the old board if I want to know who thanked the old posts. Not that I go re-reading old threads that often, but still.
 

Lex

Administrator
I know a lot of them (e.g., all the custom font formatting that users could customise posts with) were template edits that I instated myself, which I gather no one bothered to reinstate. (And some of the hacks are replicated by features that appear to be native to XenForo, like the post like system.*)

To address this here since you brought it up - we made a conscious decision not to do this. It's actually something that's really easy to do with Xen, but there was a big community discussion prior to the migration about which features we would and wouldn't carry over, and the community opted for a more aesthetically streamlined board (this is why we now have a badge system rather than custom appearance options for staff etc). Lessens the gap between staff/ non staff aswell, which is one of the reasons people wanted to go for it.

I've already addressed the thing about thanks in your returning thread, but this is like the third or fourth time you've brought it up. I feel your pain dude. We did try to import them using (first) the built-in migration tool, then a plugin. Neither worked. Prior to the migration I lobbied hard to make sure "thanks" were kept because I was expecting the community to be super salty about losing them. But literally nobody cared. Then we discussed it as a community again and decided we wouldn't keep trying to migrate, and that it was probably for the best anyway because half the "top 10" were banned. So just to lay this to rest now: it's not happening.
 

ForceStealer

Double Growth
If I've had any annoyance it's been that the board is TOO persistent in saving unfinished posts. I'll start to write something in a thread before changing my mind, and then that start of a post will just keep showing up anytime I go back to the thread :lol:
(I know there's a delete draft button but I don't often think of it.)
But I know that's not the case for an edit.
 
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