I have a question that vanished into the ether. Where did it go?

I don’t ask questions often, so I can’t address your specific question. However, since I mostly use mobile devices to access the site, I’ve lost many lengthy answers by overshooting the O or P and accidentally hitting done, the keyboard collapses but my fingers have already hit where the next letter would be – but without the keyboard there I’ve it a link… poof! Gone. And I usually don’t have time to spend or remember exactly what I was saying; so I feel your frustration.

Possibly a connection error resulted in it not being posted. According to your stats, the last question you posted before this one was a week ago. Sorry. :/

When stuff like this has happened to me, I’ve sometimes been able to use the “back” button of my browser (in Firefox, at least) to get back to the form where I entered the text, and the text will still be there. I think this will only work if you haven’t yet closed the tab. Using the “history” menu doesn’t seem to work for this; it’ll just bring up the blank form. I don’t know if you’ll be able to actually post the question from that cached version of the form, but you could at least recover the text.

Did you go to your account and click on all questions? Did you look at the top of the home page and see if there is a note to you that you have a question that needs editing? Those two places should cover all your bases if the question really has disappeared or is just hiding somewhere.

@JLeslie There is no note. There wouldn’t have been time for a note. As soon as I hit “done” there was no post at all. It was if I never made a post.

And, you went to your list in your profile of all questions? Then, it did just disappear I guess. Some sort of glitch. That has never happened to me. The only time I thought one of my questions disappeared was I put it in social and kept looking only in general.

Yep It’s gone. I’ll remember to go push the back putton like @thorninmud suggested. It’s too bad.

Whenever I start writing a question I copy all the text in the editing box so if something like that happens I can just paste it all back. This comes from years of experience with sites that like to set a short timeout limit for posting things.

I’ll remember that too, @mrentropy. I am sad to see my post go poof!

Re-create it :)

Well, don’t worry. It if was a good question, you’ll meet it again when you get to question heaven.

I’ve had it happen to me. I now compose questions in TextPad, edit and spell check them there, then cut and paste into Fluther when all is good. After the question posts, I copy its URL and paste that right after the question line, then move it down to the top of the Already Asked section. This also gives me a scratch pad to jot down ideas for future questions, URLs to articles or videos to discuss, etc.

With Fluther search on the fritz and Google so often not indexing questions here, at lease I have a searchable document to dig up old questions of mine and their URLs. For Example, here are the last two I asked.

Of L8
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Have you or your household members ever had to call 911? http://www.fluther.com/166201/have-you-or-your-household-members-ever-had-to-call-911/

I did for the first time last Saturday night. It was almost 1 AM when I heard a powerful explosion in the street just outside my study window. Running to the front door and out onto the porch, I saw that a pickup truck parked in the next block had its engine compartment and cab fully engulfed in flames. The force of the blast had blown the windows out of the cab, and fire was billowing out of them. There was also an abundance of acrid, choking smoke pouring from all the plastics and synthetics and hydrocarbons that were burning.

I ran back in and phoned 911. The response was almost instantaneous. In less than a minute of my call, three police cruisers were on the street. About two minutes later, the first of three fire trucks arrived. They had the fire out before it ever reached the gas tank of the truck.

If you’ve had to call 911, what was your emergency, and how rapid was the response.

Can you invent a needed portmanteau? http://www.fluther.com/166163/can-you-invent-a-needed-portmanteau/

Among other meanings, portmanteau refers to a new word coined from joining parts of other words or morphemes of those words, and their definitions. Well known examples include such everyday words as “avionics” from “Avi-ation and electr-Onics,” and the now familiar “bankster” from “bank-er and gang-ster.”

My candidate is “Comflusion” which is a “Com-plete” “Con-Flu-ence” of “confu-Sion,” something I often find myself in, and thus need a word for. Comflusion is both more efficient than saying “Chinese fire drill,” less ethnically insulting, more current (China’s fire drills are much more orderly these days as China drags itself into the league of 1st world nations}, and incredibly efficient speech (It means a place where all streams and happenings jointly come together in one place and time, resulting in absolute confusion.) which is a mouthful.

The challenge this question refers to is to come up with a new portmanteau that describes something we often need to talk about, but that cannot be said with any single word in the target language. All languages are open to use, but please keep the root words and the portmanteau they from in a single tongue, and if that tongue is other than English, let us know what language it’s using.

What’s your word-combo contribution, your portmanteau that’s needed because its meaning is commonly discussed and there’s no single word to capture it?