So What is Going on?

[Jim Koepke]

I just spent over an hour on a lengthy Reply to Danny Thompson's "Don't do it! Why Newbies should NOT Start with old planes.

I clicked on the Preview Post, and a screen opened saying I had to log in before I could reply. I had already logged in!

Everything was lost and now I have to tend to other things.

Sorry Dan, I think you will find great pleasure in using a plane you took the time to perfect.

Jim

[harry strasil]

do to time limits and other things that can go wrong to loose a lengthy post, anymore before I hit any post or view buttons, I hilight and copy the whole thing just in case. Just takes a few seconds, is easy and saves a lot of frustration. If something does happen, just click and paste and its all their again.

[Mike Henderson]

I do the same as Harry if my post is long. Of course, I lost a couple before I started doing that.

Mike

[Thomas Knighton]

I've been on other forums where that happened. I started highlighting longer posts, and found that clicking "preview" seemed to alleviate a lot of those headaches.

Tom

[Danny Thompson]

It's the thought that counts, Jim. I appreciate the encouragement.

[Wayne Morley]

I use a word processor and just copy and paste from it.

[joe greiner]

I use a word processor and just copy and paste from it.

I prefer Notepad, or similar plain vanilla ASCII. Eliminates needless bells and whistles, and reduces forum storage as well as page loading time. Subject to your browser's capabilities, you can insert smilies after pasting the copy.

Joe

[Wilbur Pan]

I thought cutting and pasting into the reply box effectively stripped whatever formatting your word processor would apply. In other words, cutting and pasting into the reply box results in the same text whether you started from MS Word, an ASCII editor, Notepad, or Pages (for Mac users).

If this is the case, I can't see how forum storage would be increased, except if you like using your word processor so much that your responses get longer.

For the record, this was typed with Pages on a Mac, in Helvetica 12 point font, and cut and pasted, although I usually just use the reply box. But I bet it shows up just like regular text, as if I had just used the reply box.

[Jason Beam]

Almost, Wilbur.

On Windows, copying from a "rich" source causes some of the formatting to be retained. But it depends on what you're pasting TO that determines what gets lost. If you go from Word and paste into notepad, since notepad has no formatting skills, you lose all of it. But if you go from Word and paste into another "rich" destination (like some of the forum post editors out there) some of the formatting can remain. It's nearly impossible to know in advance without pasting, unfortunately. :/