Unit History post completely disappeared.

[tonynocchi]

So after 30 minutes of crafting a unit history post for a pretty significant multi-ward event we had last night, I got an error page, "Something went wrong" and the whole thing is gone. It's not in published stories, it's not in drafts (even though it's supposed to save every 30 seconds while working on the story), it's no where to be found. Has anyone had this happen and have you had any luck retrieving it? I'm not redoing it, if it was important to the Church they'd give us tools that weren't atrociously bad.

[BrianEdwards]

So after 30 minutes of crafting a unit history post for a pretty significant multi-ward event we had last night, I got an error page, "Something went wrong" and the whole thing is gone. It's not in published stories, it's not in drafts (even though it's supposed to save every 30 seconds while working on the story), it's no where to be found. Has anyone had this happen and have you had any luck retrieving it? I'm not redoing it, if it was important to the Church they'd give us tools that weren't atrociously bad.

Do you think this might be related to similar issues we see in the Tech Forum from time-to-time, where I do something similar and fine-tune a post, only to have it disappear when I try and submit? I haven't used the Unit History in over a year now, but I do remember a time where I consistently saw similar behavior to what you describe, and I don't know if it was something specific to that tool or a general issue.

Obviously creating/modifying a post outside of the Church's interface, and then copying into the UI, will avoid a complete data loss if the servers are misfiring. But like you, there's times where many of us just use what the Church has provided, and then realize too late that this may not have been the wisest approach

[tonynocchi]

They are probably related since Unit History is very similar to a forum with posts. While the bulk of the 'text' can be created outside the Unit History, there are fields that pull from LCR data and often times I find uploading photos to be problematic and/or time consuming...which again, other than staging the photos in a folder (which I already do) can't really be done outside of the tool.

[russellhltn]

Do you think this might be related to similar issues we see in the Tech Forum from time-to-time, where I do something similar and fine-tune a post, only to have it disappear when I try and submit?

One issue with just http/https is that when you are composing a message, the server doesn't see any activity. As far as it knows, you've shutdown the computer and walked away. What it sees is the same. I think the standard timeout is 20 minutes.

In the forum, the trick is to hit "preview" periodically so the server knows your still around. I don't know if unit history has a similar feature.

I suppose it could be fixed if the website downloaded a script onto the browser to keep the server informed about the status. Not really practical in the forum as we're using a commercial package. I didn't know if unit history is built on an existing library. I'd be surprised if they're coding the low-level stuff from scratch.

[sbradshaw]

Another option could be for the website to periodically save a draft of the post to the browser's local storage. That way if your session timed out or even if you closed the browser, it could be restored. I don't blame you for not wanting to redo the work.