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Preventing an “ERROR” Messages On Our Forums: Tips!
I truly apologize to any of you who have taken the time and energy to post a long reply on our forums, only to receive the dreaded “ERROR” message when you click submit to add your post. A few members have alerted me to this, and I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for those who have been experiencing this.
I have connected with our tech team here at BioNews services in an effort to understand why this might be happening to forum members. As a patient living with IPF myself; I know the energy and concentration that goes into a thorough reply and I would hate to see that effort go to waste due to our platform not posting your message. I’ve found a couple of tips I can pass onto you in an effort to eliminate this from happening, which are:
- Due to formatting issues, the platform we use for this site often doesn’t allow people to copy a message written in Microsoft Word and paste it in the textbox on our forums. I used to type up replies and messages in Word, then try to copy and paste it into the forums simply to ensure my grammar and spelling was correct, plus it was easier for me to use Microsoft Word while I was learning the platform of the forums. However, I learnt quickly that this doesn’t work as the formatting gets all jumbled together. Therefore, please type your replies/comments/messages directly into the textbox (like this one) on the forums in order to avoid formatting issues and your message potentially being erased due to the system suspecting it is spam.
- If you type a long reply into the textbox on this site, per the direction from my tip above, it is always a good idea to save a copy of it somewhere on your computer. This will ensure your efforts aren’t lost if the message doesn’t get published. Even if you copy your reply and paste it in word (opposite to what I was discussing above) until you know for certain your reply has been published, this will guarantee a way that your efforts won’t be lost. I do this with all of my forum posts exceeding 300 words, and all of my columns.
- In an effort to prevent spammers on this site, we have installed a plug-in that only allows the “submit” button to be pressed every 30 seconds to publish a message. It used to be no one could submit something more than every 2 minutes (to avoid mass messaging/spamming) but we just changed it to every 30 seconds as of today. When you have a long post that is ready to be published on the site, please try to only hit submit once. This will prevent the system from assuming your message is spam, which it will do if you hit “submit” several times. If the system doesn’t publish your message after hitting submit, wait a few minutes before pressing it again. If it still doesn’t go live, please alert me as the forum moderator and I’ll find out what is going on for you.
I hope some of these tips help you get your messages/replies/comments on the forum. I value contributions from everyone, and want to ensure your efforts are never missed out on and that you can get your posts live on the forum. Are there any other “ERROR” messages you’re receiving?
Let me know and I’ll try to find out the answers as to why!
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