Here's A Fun One , Hal

[Bill Greenwood]

After spending about 15 minutes typing a long answer to one of my posts, it will not take it.
"your submission has been rejected because the token has expired" or some such gibberish.

[Tom Downey]

write in a word processor, then copy and paste.

[Hal Bryan]

The forum software (vBulletin) has an automatic "session timeout" set to 15 minutes by default, though ours is set to twice that. The timer is only supposed to measure inactivity - I would have thought that composing a post would count as "activity" but that may not be the case, I'll have to dig into that. I wonder if maybe there was a connection hiccup somewhere between us and you...?

[PaulDow]

I know when typing a reply, I see the "Auto Saved" message pop up every couple of minutes. Do you see that? I don't know where it's saving to, and what you can do with the saved partial message though.

[Hangar10]

write in a word processor, then copy and paste.

This is always the safe bet... nothing more frustrating than typing a well thought out reply than to have it vanish. I frequent a couple of other sites that are somewhat unreliable to post. The only problem is an occasional formatting issue, but at least the text is safe.

I will say that I have not had any issues with the new vBulletin powered EAAForums.

[Bill Greenwood]

Thanks for the explanation Hal. I should have typed a little faster, I was trying to make a more detailed response on the topic of spins and spin recovery since some posters objected to the basic method I suggested.
I should not have trusted that a computer was going to work anyway, especially for me.

[Hal Bryan]

It still shouldn't have happened that way, Bill - I'd already increased the timeout to something much closer to 30 minutes, so I'm still hoping to get to the bottom of what you ran into.

Granted, I've worked with computers and software too long to trust them, so, if I know it's going to be a long post, I do tend to follow Tom and Mark's advice and compose it offline, just in case.

Having said that...

I know when typing a reply, I see the "Auto Saved" message pop up every couple of minutes. Do you see that? I don't know where it's saving to, and what you can do with the saved partial message though.

As you're composing a post, the text is "Auto Saved" every 60 seconds (that's the default timing anyway.) If your browser crashes or you accidentally close the tab or whatever, the next time you log in to the forums and open the post editor (to create a new thread or reply) you'll see a button at the bottom that reads "Restore AutoSaved Content" - push that, and everything you'd typed as of the last time it saved magically reappears. It's actually a nice little feature.