Hey gang.....
I have an update on the forum extension for avoiding loss of posts prior to it being saved.
The
short update is there should be a new and hopefully improved extension that will be getting deployed once it goes through more testing.
The
long version of this update is this....
While the original extension was helpful, it seems kinda glitchy, so it got a good sized overhaul.
This extension is unrelated to the Captcha response message of "The solution you provided was incorrect". If you are still getting this message, let me know.
So this extension involves Posting and PM'ing. It stores what you type into your browsers local storage, so if something happens before it's saved to the board, it is not lost. Examples being if your browsers session expires, if you accidentally close your browser or tab or click a link to a different page before you are done, or your browser just crashes. Regarding session timeouts, we did bump the timeout to 2 hours, but it can still happen, and this should help with that.
What was done to improve it over the original extension?
Improved key accuracy. There should now only be 1 key for your specific post or 1 for your PM. Previously, if you hit Preview, you got a different key which meant if your session expired, the recovery would look for the non-Preview key, which is bad, because you wouldn't get your latest version recovered and an old key and content was left behind to possibly be inadvertently be recovered later when you didn't want it to be. This should be improved.
Timer removal. Previously, it had a timer to update what you had typed into your browsers local storage every 10 seconds. I'm assuming this was done for efficiency. I think it may have inadvertently caused some occasional random cases of writing the key back in, in the very short window after the submit button had been pressed and but before the next page started to load, which would cause your message to be available to be restored later when you didn't need it to be restored. The timer has been removed.
Accidental message storage removal. Previously it was too aggressive at clearing your storage out and could leave you with no message to recover when you thought it was available to be recovered. It now only attempts to clear your local storage out only when you hit the Submit button
AND after it confirms that your session is still active. It wont stop your session of timing out, but if it does time out, your message will still be available to be restored automatically so it's not lost.
How can you help? Testing it out... I've tried to test it under the scenarios I could think of, but before I release this new version back out, I was hoping to see if there might be a couple of people willing to also try it out where you may do something I wasn't thinking of or have a setup I wasn't considering to make sure it's good to go, or still needs a few updates. If you would have time to try it out, Thank you! You can head over to the Dev site at
https://dev.nationalparkschat.com If you do go there, just be aware which site you are on at all times as they look the same but are different.
One note: The session timeout on the Dev server is currently set to
2 minutes to test recovery after session timeouts. Please let me know if you have a chance to try it out and what your experience was with posting and PM'ing and your session expiring or browser closing. It would be most helpful!
Thanks gang!
Cheers!
Kyle....