Your posts will now be autosaved as you're typing, plus other improvements

[Clinton]

We've had more than one or two cases in the past where someone spent a long time typing up a detailed post only to lose it because they got timed out or restarted their PC or had a browser/PC crash.

I know how frustrating that can be and hopefully it won't happen again.

This forum now autosaves posts periodically while you're typing.

With the weekend's upgrades, tweaks and improvements you may notice one or two other things have changed (and/or broken .. in which case PM me!)

Mobiles: For example, this site should now render properly on mobiles (even though our recent poll suggested not that many of you visit on mobiles regularly).

Smilies: There are also a few new smileys to choose from. OK, this was a difficult choice, I didn't want to enable to full collection of double heart, flirting and bart simpson smilies so selected a few that I considered not too juvenile for a business forum such as ours. There's still a limit of number of smilies you can use in each post and it still makes sense to use them sparingly.

Speed: Some minor speed improvements e.g. if you've connected to Skype in your profile, this forum won't make direct calls to Skype for an image to use alongside your name in every post you make. There is also a bit more caching of CSS and other files.

[Kay]

Thanks for all your efforts to make this a better place.

The smilies are, erm, interesting. My all-time favourite, which still seems to be missing from EP is the "wicked evil" one - the thing which you use to banter with someone, when you say something a little bit naughty but it's said in jest. It's sort of like the winkie but perhaps a bit more devilish.

I love the "worked to 5am" one. I can think of a few people on here who could perceive that as being their personal emoticon.

[rob]

I was just about to post up asking is it the browser or forum! A nice yellow 'autosave' box pops up when you write a fair bit, very useful if you misclick or hit 'back' Good stuff!

[Clinton]

Here you go, Kay, just uploaded

I spoil my mods!

<Added> BTW, autosave works even when you're typing up a PM.

[Kay]

Oooh! Thanks. If that's supposed to represent me, then I'd better get my eyebrows plucked.

[crabfoot]

Please stop plucking about ...

[Clinton]

"Mark Forums Read" was not working. Now fixed.

Other minor problems also fixed.

One issue still outstanding is one crabfoot has highlighted and which I am still unable to solve. That's with the cursor jumping about in the box when typing up a post or a PM. It doesn't always happen, but when you've typed something up and wish to insert a word in the text you may use your mouse to position the cursor in the spot where you want to start typing. The problem is that sometimes the cursor doesn't stay where you located it and your typing ends up in the wrong place!

I haven't been able to solve this yet. But there's a workaround. I've found that positioning the cursor using the keyboard arrow keys instead of the mouse doesn't cause the same problem.

I'll keep working on the problem.

Any other issues or bugs you notice, please PM me.

[grynge]

When I use my arrow keys the cursor dissapears and I have to reclick the reply box to get it back again.

[crabfoot]

When I use my arrow keys the cursor dissapears and I have to reclick the reply box to get it back again.

You are not alone. Sometmes the arrow keys appear to be designated to move you around the page - up and down work like a notchy version of the mouse wheel - and then again, sometimes they work to move around the text box, like you would expect (they are doing that as I type this reply).

Methinks Clinton's post count in the VB forums has gone up a bit lately ...

[KenW3]

After testing, this is a problem specific to Firefox in three vB text entry areas. The cursor problem occurs in the Private Messages section - Send New message, and in the Forum area for both Quick Reply and Post New Thread. Using Firefox, the cursor difficulty does not occur in the forum area for Reply With Quote, nor in the Private Messages area for either Quick Reply or Reply To Private Message.

I tested the above 6 text entry areas across current versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Opera.
The only browser with cursor problems was Firefox, so it seems there is some incompatibility between this version of vB and the Firefox browser.

[Edit: The same cursor difficulty exists using Firefox to post in Groups and for comments on Blogs.]