I've lost 2 posts in the last 2 weeks.

  • Unknown's avatar
    jsbull · Member ·

    I am a user of a WordPress.com hosted blog: http://www.imatravelninja.com. This is not a missing blog post or something like that, this is about writing content, then it disappearing, being over-written or otherwise eaten by the WordPress system.

    I’ve now lost 6+ hours of work across two incidents of WordPress deleting my progress.

    First issue: I created a post online before a trip and added all photos I’d need for it. I then departed and spent 5 hours writing an entire, finished post on my iPad. I get home, open WordPress online to proof it and publish it, but it’s blank on the website. I look at my iPad and it’s still in airplane mode. I take it off airplane mode and it syncs. Problem is, the website auto saved a blank version of the blog moments before when I opened it online, so it overwrites the entire completed post on my iPad. It’s gone forever, no way to retrieve and 5 hours wasted.

    Today: I am working 100% online. I get a good portion of the post written, then go talk to a colleague. I come back and type for another hour to complete the content of the post. I go up and click “Save Draft” and a page comes up requesting my login credentials. I enter my info, assuming it will then save my progress, but instead it deleted all my progress and took me back to the last saved version, more than 1 hour earlier.

    I love the ease of WordPress, but I can’t continue to lose work. I’m 14 posts in and have already lost 2. I guess I’ll start writing the posts somewhere else and paste them in, but this is an issue that has to be resolved. With the iPad, it should have cached a version on the iPad for me to retrieve, or asked me permission to overwrite the post. Today, it should have warned me that it was not still auto saving or that I was leaving the page and would lose unsaved content. I could have simply copied the post if I had received that warning, then pasted it back after logging in.

    WordPress is too big of a resource to let these types of issues happen, I hope they are addressed and solved soon.
    Blog url: http://imatravelninja.wordpress.com/

  • bryanvillarin · Staff ·

    I’m really sorry for the inconvenience. That’s really frustrating, and we’ll be happy to help find out what’s going on.

    Can you let us know the names and post URLs of the two posts so we can take a closer look?

  • Unknown's avatar
    jsbull · Member ·

    I know why the iPad written post was lost, it was overwritten by an autosave because my iPad was on airplane mode. I think I explained it pretty well above, so I won’t try again unless you have questions. Here is the post, after I re-wrote it: http://imatravelninja.com/2012/02/08/ohares-little-hidden-oasis/.

    The one I lost a lot of yesterday was titled: Tips for Asian Travel, the preview is here: http://imatravelninja.com/?p=358&preview=true. I still haven’t gotten that one back to where I was I don’t think. I plan to publish it next week.

    Also, is there a way to remove the date from the auto url creator? My last blog was launched on the 15th, but it shows the 9th on the blog post. When I noticed that, I updated the date, but it changed the url and killed all the links distributed on Twitter, Facebook, etc. I had to change it back to the 9th to save those links and prevent an issue. The date associated with the post should always be the date it was posted on unless you manually overwrite it. I believe the 9th was when I started writing that post, but I’m not sure why the system stuck with that date when it wasn’t ever published until the 15th. Frustrating from an organizational standpoint.

    Thanks for the attention and help.

  • staff-blorbo · Staff ·

    No, unfortunately there is no way to remove the date from the post permalink.

    As for “Tips for Asian Travel,” were you writing this in the Visual editor tab, HTML editor tab, or full screen editor?

  • Unknown's avatar
    jsbull · Member ·

    Visual editor tab.

    Do you see the problem with the date in the permalink? I’d expect this has come up before. If I have my own domain, I’ll never name a post the exact same, so why is the date required? If you try to name a post the same, it could automatically add a 2 to it, warn you, etc. That seems like a better option than getting stuck with bad dates sometimes in the post and url.

    Thanks again.

  • staff-blorbo · Staff ·

    I do see the problem there, it is something we’re looking into.

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