Request: the ability to retrieve a comment that was almost posted to a deleted thread.

July 30, 2006 12:19 PM

A FPP rant was recently deleted after I began to compose my response. Hence, by the time I was ready to post, the thread was closed to new comments... and I lost several good paragraphs that I would have been content to post elsewhere. Respectfully request some scheme (redirection to Preview Page, for instance) whereby content is retrieveable in such a case.
posted by The Confessor to feature requests at 12:19 PM (30 comments total)

Just hit the 'back' button on your browser.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 12:21 PM on July 30, 2006

I made it a habit to do a CTRL-A CTRL-C in the post form every time I post something.

But the reason is sudden Mefi downtimes, not closed threads.
posted by uncle harold at 12:27 PM on July 30, 2006

i was doing the same, in the same thread. back button, dude. lern yor sofwhere.
posted by quonsar at 12:37 PM on July 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

I'd like to request a pissing elephant hotkey.
posted by Krrrlson at 12:41 PM on July 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

Your browser's back button should provide this function.
posted by tiamat at 12:42 PM on July 30, 2006

Fandango has twice in a row only posted a pissing elephant. Can an admin please remove his disgraceful comment.
posted by Merik at 12:48 PM on July 30, 2006

thanks, tiamat ... now how do i clean elephant piss from my keyboard?
posted by pyramid termite at 12:48 PM on July 30, 2006

I'm not sure the back button always works (having said that it was fine when I tried it just now). I copy to notepad if I'm writing a long post because I've spent hours on posts before and totally lost them to jrun refusals, cfm crash outs, sql mangulations and what not.

Also, firefox 2.0 alpha has a tendency to crash if the spell checker is switched on.

As for a pissing elephant hotkey, there's a grease monkey script for that isn't there?
posted by davehat at 12:54 PM on July 30, 2006

Heh. Me too. I was having such fun composing a slam for Baby_Balrog I missed the boat. Oh well, I guess with Newsfilter FPPs it's always a race against time.
posted by Decani at 12:54 PM on July 30, 2006

I'm not so sure about that, Decani. On any given day the front page seems to be full of them.
posted by persona non grata at 1:03 PM on July 30, 2006

Fandango has twice in a row only posted a pissing elephant. Can an admin please remove his disgraceful comment.

I agree. First of all just because you think a thread is going to be deleted doesn't mean you just post offensive stuff. Second of all you shouldn't post offensive stuff in a thread about a recent massacre of dozens of people.
posted by delmoi at 1:15 PM on July 30, 2006

png: true. But this one was slamming Israel, so it was pretty clearly not long for the world.
posted by Decani at 1:17 PM on July 30, 2006

I'm not sure the back button always works (having said that it was fine when I tried it just now). I copy to notepad if I'm writing a long post because I've spent hours on posts before and totally lost them to jrun refusals, cfm crash outs, sql mangulations and what not.

Yeah, the back button doesn't work if the site crashes, but any sort of comment saving scheme wouldn't work if the site crashed either. I usually copy and paste longer comments in to word in order to spell-check them so I usually still have a copy of my comment if the site dies. Not that it does me any good in that case, though.
posted by delmoi at 1:17 PM on July 30, 2006

Many years of losing a lot of work due to flaky browsers/connections/servers/etc means I pretty much always compose my lengthy posts in notepad (or emacs,) and copy-paste them in.

Haven't really found a solution for losing 84-part forms, other than bashing my forehead into my keyboard and cursing when something goes wrong.
posted by blenderfish at 1:21 PM on July 30, 2006

I don't paste them into word but I do copy them. I type them in the text field here and then copy them. Every fascinating comment is then held captive inside my mouse until I release it.

I copy every. single. comment. It's a good habit to get into.
posted by iconomy at 1:23 PM on July 30, 2006

If you're typing from a network environment that had a resident keystroke logger, your stuff's already saved for you.
posted by Smart Dalek at 1:45 PM on July 30, 2006

"has". But my admin knew that...
posted by Smart Dalek at 1:46 PM on July 30, 2006

I never programmed something to "save" comments on deleted threads because the window for doing that is really small and it's a real edgecase. It's not too hard to do though, so eventually I probably will do something for this scenario.
posted by mathowie at 2:18 PM on July 30, 2006

Also, firefox 2.0 alpha has a tendency to crash if the spell checker is switched on.

Do you not know what the word "alpha" means in relation to software releases? :P
posted by cyrusdogstar at 2:25 PM on July 30, 2006

Yes. It means it's web 2.0.
posted by crunchland at 2:48 PM on July 30, 2006

posted by rob paxon at 2:50 PM on July 30, 2006

God I love that French news anchor. It's a good thing I don't live in France or I would have fucked my way through a fortune in plasma TVs by now.
posted by jonson at 2:53 PM on July 30, 2006

Yes. It means it's web 2.0.

No, that's beta. I suppose by Web 3.0 the alpha will be the trendy release, but right now it's beta :)
posted by cyrusdogstar at 2:54 PM on July 30, 2006

Just hit the 'back' button on your browser.

Tried to do exactly that the other day. Got a big ass error message.
posted by c13 at 2:54 PM on July 30, 2006

posted by Saucy Intruder at 5:37 PM on July 30, 2006

It kills me that I can't read your several good paragraphs. I've cried a bit actually. Perhaps a major media Mogul might publish those perfect paragraphs so we all can benefit. Mr The Confessor my mother told me I had a normal dick, of course I believed her, had no reason not to. She was a good Catholic women with no reason to lie. Naturally she wasn't exactly a connoisseur of cock either. I hope this helps you with your future contributions, 'cause I really want to avoid comming across banality on, or near, this scale again.
posted by econous at 6:20 PM on July 30, 2006

This comment necessitates a new clickable symbol which should follow the [+][!]:

[?]

which would then show something similar to: 1 user has marked this as WTF are you smoking
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:04 PM on July 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:04 PM EST on July 30 [+] [!] [?] [@] [Ӕ] [♠]
posted by Plutor at 7:22 PM on July 30, 2006

posted by Plutor at 7:22 PM PST on July 30 [♥] [!]

grumble grumble
posted by fleacircus at 11:37 PM on July 30, 2006

Yeah, the back button doesn't work if the site crashes, but any sort of comment saving scheme wouldn't work if the site crashed either.

Well, if you saved the comment to a temporary cookie onsubmit it should still be there when the site came back up.
posted by ducksauce at 12:02 PM on July 31, 2006