"No thread specified" error

Lately, at times when I press the "Preview Post" button, it gives me the error "No Thread specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the webmaster." I've tried clearing cache and cookies, but the issue still persists.

P.S. When I tried to preview this post, it said "No Forum specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the webmaster."

...and what URL are you at when it happens? http://www.doomworld.com/vb/newreply.php ?

Well, I just noticed that after the first time I hit "Preview Reply", the URL goes to http://www.doomworld.com/vb/newreply.php. I thought I remembered one time it doing that when it still had the thread and post numbers, but I could be wrong.

To clarify: this doesn't happen every time, just at seemingly random occasions. Like right now I've tried to recreate it about 50 times and have been unsuccessful.

edit: okay it just did it, and the url was http://www.doomworld.com/vb/newreply.php

edit again: It just happened with the thread id in the url.

The only consistent way I know of getting this error is to start writing a longish reply/starting a longish thread: there's a timeout timer set to something like 5 minutes (?) after which posting sessions expire (and you're often automatically logged out as well). The solution is to write long posts externally and only pasting them in a post once 100% ready, you can't leave long posts "in flight" for too long.

Maes said:

The only consistent way I know of getting this error is to start writing a longish reply/starting a longish thread: there's a timeout timer set to something like 5 minutes (?) after which posting sessions expire (and you're often automatically logged out as well). The solution is to write long posts externally and only pasting them in a post once 100% ready, you can't leave long posts "in flight" for too long.

Never happened to me. And I never get logged out from DW either.

Jodwin said:

Never happened to me. And I never get logged out from DW either.

The former may just be because you never actually kept a reply/post page open long enough, and the former is a setting in user profile options "Automatically login when you return to the site? (uses cookies)", which I have off. If I don't register any activity for a while, I have to log in again.

I've kept the window open a half hour + and never seen this problem, so it may have something to do with the way the string is being handled.

*shrug* here, time the difference between those two posts of mine, where I had to log in again. It's always been like that for me, and I recall fraggle or another mod saying that this is the expected default behavior. As I said, I don't have cookied auto-login for DW on, so I don't know how it'd behave.

Other forums I know of also have a timeout policy for unfinished/hanging posts: if you take too long, your session key or whatever gets recycled and you're left with a "dead" link. Then again, I don't know if being cookied/autologging changes this behavior. Only the admins know for sure.

Maybe Doomworld is trying to tell you something ;)

In posting in another thread I got the error, but when I hit Back, half of the message I typed was there, so maybe there's some truth to what Maes is saying. However, the post was like 3 lines long and it didn't come close to taking 5 minutes.

Super Jamie said:

Maybe Doomworld is trying to tell you something ;)

You ain't getting off that easy, honey.