Rob Prime wrote:Mike, could you please edit your post next time instead of posting 8 posts within a timespan of 10 minutes?
Well, I've removed the text of the last post, when it finally did work. But as for "instead of posting 8 posts within a timespan of 10 minutes" - no, that's not really a viable option for me. I tried posting it as a single post, many times. It didn't work until I broke it up. This has happened numerous times before, as well. I continued to attempt posting the full text several more times even after I'd started breaking it up - only the last attempt worked. I included that success to document what actually happened this time, even though that final success did not match the usual
pattern I've observed.
I can't delete the old posts, just edit them. After all the trouble I've had, I'm not going to edit eight posts to leave behind empty shells. I'm happy to do it with one post, though.
David Newton wrote:It's not a length-of-post issue, it's a JavaRanch issue. Witness the folks that post 500 lines of code.
I agree it's a JavaRanch issue, but for me, it also seems to be a length issue. It used to be a frequently recurring problem; it went away for maybe half a year, and just recently it's resumed as a recurring problem. I have consistently observed that, when JavaRanch does act up, I get much, much, much more chance of posting successfully if break up the post into smaller posts. And I'm well aware that longer posts are possible, when the forum software is not acting up. But during periods of trouble, I can either not post at all, or I can break up the posts. I choose the latter.
From past experiments, I've determined that this behavior affects my posts from home, but not from work. It does not seem to depend on which browser I use, or which computer. I'm guessing it's something to do with either the ISP or the modem. (Hmmm... I haven't tried using a direct connection instead of wireless, when the problem occurs. Need to try that...) I have no idea why the problem occurs, or why it follows the particular symptoms I observe. Or why I seem to be the only person who sees this particular set of symptoms. But that doesn't change the fact that I have observed it, many times, and that I have seen a very strong correlation between the length of my posts and their chance of erroring out. It's not an absolute rule; there are exceptions on either side. But there's a strong correlation.