My draft has vanished

My co-author and I have just finished a story, pasted it into the Lush form, saved it, went back and edited it, saved it again, edited it some more, and were on the verge of publishing it when it vanished. It's listed neither in my published stories, nor in my unpublished stories.

This is more than slightly annoying as it took us a fair amount of time to polish it and get it just so.

The name of the story is "Naked Dreams and Seduction", by JamesLlewellyn and NikaS. It is the second story in a series, "Nika S: The Dark Time".

Perversely, it is listed as a sequel in that series in the "Edit Series" window, but I cannot find it anywhere else.

One of the moderators was able to find the story in my list, and sent me a link. Sure enough, the link works, but I still can't see it among my stories, which means I can neither edit it nor publish it.

I reported this as a bug but was told it is NOT a bug, and that I should report it here.

So – what do I do now?

Help?

I can see it in your Unpublished list too.

There was an update made to the site today which affords moderators the ability to see unpublished works. I wonder if this has had a knock-on effect somehow and made it invisible to you? Very weird. Can you please perform some diagnostics:

1) Can you see the other five pieces in your Unpublished list?

2) If you force refresh (Shift-F5, CMD-R, etc) the Unpublished page, does it change anything?

3) Can you edit any of the unpublished pieces and commit the changes (even just a word or add a space/bit of punctuation and see if it sticks)?

4) If you follow the direct link supplied by the moderator to the missing piece of work, what options do you have for editing? Does it look any different to the interface for the other unpublished pieces? Can you edit it at all? Is the edit button missing? When modding pieces, sometimes I click through and the edit button sub-panel isn't there but a hard refresh makes it reappear. Does that happen with yours?

Basically I'm trying to figure out if there's anything different about this piece that might be triggering some weird behaviour. We've had odd things where someone who's blocked a user twice prevents their profile loading. We've had people who have set their privacy settings to 'no contact from men' have been unable to access certain content. And so forth.

Anything you can spot that might set this missing piece apart from the others would be most helpful to diagnose what's going on.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

I can see it in your Unpublished list too.

Refreshing the pages seems to have done the trick. I can now see it and edit it.

Not sure what that was – but thanks for the help!

No problem. Sometimes an aggressive cache either on the server side, CDN, or the browser can result in things getting 'stuck'. The conversation usually goes:

Browser: "Can I have the page please?"

Server: "I've given you that already, mate."

Browser: "Are you sure nothing's changed since last time I asked?"

Server (checking in its filing cabinet): "Yeah, positive."

Browser (opening its saddle bag and taking out the copy last sent): "Alright, thanks. Bye."

Sometimes, force refreshing can break that cycle and basically tells the server to shut up lying, and damn well deliver the content whether it's changed or not.

This sort of thing happens most often when there's been an update applied because the datestamps can get out of sync between server and browser. An annoyance, but without a cache, the internet would be a shitload slower than it is already, as there'd be much more unnecessary content being exchanged.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

No problem. Sometimes an aggressive cache either on the server side, CDN, or the browser can result in things getting 'stuck'. The conversation usually goes:

Browser: "Can I have the page please?"

Server: "I've given you that already, mate."

Browser: "Are you sure nothing's changed since last time I asked?"

Server (checking in its filing cabinet): "Yeah, positive."

Browser (opening its saddle bag and taking out the copy last sent): "Alright, thanks. Bye."

Sometimes, force refreshing can break that cycle and basically tells the server to shut up lying, and damn well deliver the content whether it's changed or not.

This sort of thing happens most often when there's been an update applied because the datestamps can get out of sync between server and browser. An annoyance, but without a cache, the internet would be a shitload slower than it is already, as there'd be much more unnecessary content being exchanged.

One more thing occurred to me that might be useful for you to know. After I had saved, then re-opened this draft, and was about to save again, the system kicked me out, just when I clicked on the "Edit" button, and I had to sign in again. This happened twice, for no discernable reason. I finally went to my browser's history, and went reverted back to the version just saved.

That was when I started having the problems with editing or submitting.

Thanks for your help.

James

Useful info, thanks. Being kicked off is usually a sign that your login cookie has been invalidated somehow. Not sure under what circumstances that might occur here.

But yes, going back to a previous cached copy of a page could indeed trigger odd behaviour, depending on the reason for getting kicked off in the first place. Going back resubmits old headers to the server, and the session might become out of sync with whatever hashes have been negotiated (guesswork on my part: I have no idea what info is exchanged as I've not analysed it).

This is all useful feedback though as it can highlight odd system behaviour that manifests itself in a lumpy experience. Thank you.