I have received an error message several times when I have tried to respond to posts on the forum.  The system returns me to the CFI home page and comes up with the error message 404: page not found.  Any idea what is happening?  I thought it might be the length of my post, but I was not lengthy, and I shortened it anyway, but it still dropped me.  Help, please?

There have been a number of transient bugs with the system here ... not sure what can be done except to refer them to the IT staff. (I deleted your duplicate post FYI).

One of my posts hasn’t appeared in its forum or in my “public profile”‘s list of past posts, and I didn’t get an error message about it; it just vanished.

The subject was something like ” ‘How to Get on an Atheist’s Good Side’ circulates in the right-wing world,” and I sent it on 12/24 at around 8:30 a.m.

Is there a place to report such problems?

This software apparently from time to time has problems with Internet Explorer, where the reply form disappears without uploading the information to the website ... if the form didn’t upload properly here, there’s nothing much to be done from this end.

Is the problem browser specific?  You mention IE but I use Firefox, on Windows. 

I didn’t mention it before in case it was a silent deletion by a moderator.  I don’t post on boards much, so I sometimes bump against user rules that I don’t know about.

Like the “no politics” rule on Chowhound.com, where my longish essay on turtle cookery was deleted because I’d named my three food turtles Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.  I left after that.

josh_karpf - 26 December 2008 02:46 PM

Is the problem browser specific?  You mention IE but I use Firefox, on Windows. 

I didn’t mention it before in case it was a silent deletion by a moderator.  I don’t post on boards much, so I sometimes bump against user rules that I don’t know about.

Like the “no politics” rule on Chowhound.com, where my longish essay on turtle cookery was deleted because I’d named my three food turtles Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.  I left after that.

Did you see the post on the site before it disappeared? I can’t speak for all the Mods but we almost never delete posts except if we believe them to be spam. If an existing member in good standing puts spam up, we will usually edit the post and/or give a public warning rather than simply deleting. (Immediate deletions and banning happen with newbies who post spam).

Otherwise posts can be edited or deleted if they fall afoul of one of the other rules. This happens very rarely, except in the case of copyrighted content which often has to be truncated.

So I doubt that it was a Moderator action. But it would be good to know if the post ever was actually uploaded properly and then disappeared later, or if it simply never uploaded properly.

As for browser specificity, I’ve only heard the problem happening with IE. I will send a message to Alan who knows more about the specifics here.

dougsmith - 26 December 2008 02:36 PM

This software apparently from time to time has problems with Internet Explorer, where the reply form disappears without uploading the information to the website ... if the form didn’t upload properly here, there’s nothing much to be done from this end.

Would it be better to use Firefox, then? I’ll try it.

I use a Mac with Safari, usually.

I tried using Firefox.  No luck.  I guess I have the mark of the beast!

You are still getting error messages? It might help Alan to know what the messages say and when they pop up.

dougsmith - 26 December 2008 08:06 PM

You are still getting error messages? It might help Alan to know what the messages say and when they pop up.

Yes.  Error 404: sorry we can’t find that page (or words to that effect).

Alan tells me it may be some transient error with the software package we’re using. A 404 error is very generic. At any rate there will be an upgrade to the software at some point soon; we’ll hope they catch the problem.

If you find that you get one particular error when doing a particular sort of thing, that would probably be more helpful diagnostically.

It may also have been that the software or website went offline temporarily while you were trying to post. Sometimes that seems to happen (at least from my end).

I got hit again: “Sorry, we couldn’t find the page you were looking for.” ERROR 404.

This can’t go on - this time I worked for several hours on the piece and now I can’t get it up on the system.  I altered it, shortened it, took out a plethora of code, changed threads.  Nothing.  Now I’ll try Firefox, but it didn’t help yesterday, why should it help now?

My smiles are getting a bit strained now.

Please help.

Firefox did nothing to help.

When does this happen? It might help to get a detailed description of what you are doing when you encounter the 404 error.

One thing that Occam does is to copy his work into wordpad before uploading it. That way if the gremlins get it, he can just paste the message back into the “reply” box and try again.

FWIW I’m using Safari on a Mac and almost never have any problems.

At any rate, Alan is aware of this thread, but isn’t sure what’s going on, so doesn’t know what to fix.

I get the same 404 error message when using Firefox. Safari works fine for me.

George - 27 December 2008 03:00 PM

I get the same 404 error message when using Firefox. Safari works fine for me.

I get it with both.  Does anyone know why?

Are you using a Mac?