Suggestion to Blurb about how to handle "long posts" !!!!!
Hi Guys; I was mad as hell at Blurb this morning, because having spent an hour dealing with a user’s questions, as soon as I hit the "Post" button, I got a maddeningly inane message to say something like "Hold on tiger; you need at least 5 characters for a post", and then you deleted all my work Gone, nada, an hour wasted !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You need to find a way of warning forum posters that they only have a limited number of characters, and give us a warning when we’re reaching the max; so we can post & start a "part 2". AND, DON’T DELETE THE B****Y POST before having the option re-format! Thanks; Lee
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Blurb, I wholeheartedly agree with Lee, and then some! This certainly needs fixing! I reported the problem back in March (incident no. 080324-000017) but nothing has improved. I hit this problem again last week, it is SO frustrating. I still don’t know what the limit is so it is always trial and error when you do a long post. If you can’t fix the problem at least put a warning at the top of the REPLY TO TOPIC dialogue giving the limit. .......Tony
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Hey guys - Sorry for the delay. I wanted to have a solution for you before I replied. First off, our apologies — we totally agree that losing a post because of a technical hiccup is incredibly frustrating. To help guard against spam, flamers, etc., we have certain systems in place to help us. One of which is the 5,000 character maximum (or about 1,000 words).
It has always been the case that when creating a new topic, if the post is over 5,000 characters, you’ll receive an error—but don’t lose your message. Unfortunately, we weren’t aware that this wasn’t the case for replies to a post.
This has now been fixed. If the character count is too long, you’ll now see a warning pop up. But your message will stay put, and you’ll be able to edit appropriately. Over the next few weeks, we’re hoping to add some additional functionality that will help with some of the other posting problems we’ve seen on the Forums. As always, your feedback is appreciated. And thanks again for your patience. Jack
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Oh, one other thing. As you’ve probably already noticed — if you’re copying and pasting formatted text from another program (like Microsoft Word), a lot of "invisible" HTML code can end up being pasted in as well. Though the code sometimes displays incorrectly as text (and sometimes doesn’t), but it all goes towards the overall character count. Not to mention the fact that you can end up with some very weird formatting in your post. So, if you’re using a different application to compose your post, you may want to first be sure that it’s nothing but plain text you’re copying. One sure fire way to do this is to first save what you’ve written as a plain text file. Then, open that file in a simple tool like NotePad, and finally copy and paste that version of your text into your Forum post.
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THANK YOU Jack; That should make life a little easier… Cheers; Lee
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That’s great news Jack. Some questions just demand a long long answer! Thanks to you and your team for fixing this one. .......Tony p.s. I only used Word once, never to be repeated!
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p.s. Now the bad news! Every posy I’ve made this morning including the above one has caused the Not so fast tiger message to pop up at thge top of the thread, but the post went ahead fine anyway. .........Tony
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Hi Tony; I have NOT encountered that…. my posts this morning went through "as normal"... By the way; did you notice that your "numbered" post in the new release thread is now showing it’s numbers in both the "live" and "review" views ? Cheers; Lee
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They still aren’t showing for me Lee, this gets wiereder and wierder. What browser do you use? I’m using Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.11 on XP Professional. Maybe I need an upgrade? ........Tony
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Hi Tony; I’m still on IE6x running XP Home SP2… My general philosophy is "if it ‘aint broke – don’t fix it" ! (I’m even baulking at installing SP3…) Cheers; Lee
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I got the Not so fast Tiger on that post as well!
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Hi Tony; Your numbers have disappeared for me too now !!!! Gremlins clearly at work here… Lee
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Hey guys, we released a fix for the issue where you lose your post if it’s too long. You should now get a message that pops up if your post is long, and then have an opportunity to shorten it.
In testing that fix, we also noticed the problem you are talking about where the ‘not so fast tiger’ message continually shows up. We’ll be digging deeper on that one, hopefully fixing it soon.
And lkb-28, I would argue that IE6 is quite broken ;)
You’d be surprised how much of my day is spent building work-arounds for bugs within IE6. My recomendation would be to try Safari or Firefox, but IE7 is also much better.
But I know what you’re saying about sticking with what works for you :)
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