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The first part of the phenomenon I have frequently, mostly when I am editing intensively various entries: the software then tends to claim that “Anonymous Coward” has locked some entry. At the beginning I thought somebody was tracking my edits on RecentlyRevised and intervening as soon as he spots a typo or something. But over the months or years (what is it by now) it became clear that it’s just the software playing tricks on me.
On the other hand, ever since then I simply click “edit anyway” and all is fine (except for the few further seconds lost in building up the spurious lock-message).
The lock is only a soft-lock. If you click edit anyway then it will save the edit (that is, it will accomplish what you want and will not take you back to the editing screen) - at least, that’s what I think happens, I haven’t tested right now. The danger that it is warning you about is that if there are two editors working on the same page, then the last one always “wins”.
I don’t remember seeing this myself. I’ll have a go at Urs’ many-edits version to see if I can reproduce it.
Thanks Andrew. But maybe you shouldn’t waste time with this as long as there are more pressing questions. I guess this will be hard to reproduce and it’s not such a big deal.
I experience exactly the same behaviour iff I have cookies disabled.
Re #5 and lost changes: some time back I learned (from Toby, at this Forum) of free software called Lazarus which enables lost data in a web form, such as in an edit box on an nLab page or a comment box at the Café, to be recovered. I find it invaluable. I don’t know if it’s available for use on any browser.
Okay, I misunderstood where the error message was coming from.
Yes, this is due to cookies. I just disabled cookies on my browser and got this exact problem. Thanks IngoBlechschmidt.
Instiki soft-locks the page when you start editing it. When you save it, it needs to verify that you are the same person as the one who locked it. It does this by using cookies (as it is hosted in the US, we don’t have to declare this!). So if you have cookies disabled then it doesn’t know that you are the same person as the one who locked it and it wants to verify that you are prepared to break the lock first. But then, I guess, the standard next step after breaking the lock is to edit the page - this is what would normally happen if you had encountered the "break lock" situation with cookies enabled.
So solution: enable cookies for the nlab. Sometimes you might end up at an alias for the nlab and if you only allow cookies for selected sites this might be confusing your browser.
The error message could be more helpful, I guess.
Re Lazarus: this is a Firefox add-on. The Internet suggests that it’s also available in Safari and Chromium (or at least Chrome). The Opera extension ‘Textarea Backup Localstorage’ allegedly also does the job.
But I have actually disabled Lazarus, because it slows things down so much!
With Firefox nothing else is needed to recover typed content in an nLab edit page: the back button will recover that.
The same is not true for other edit windows, such as those of the nForum. But I don’t use anything like Lazarus for those. I simply have developed the by now hard-wired habit of hitting
Ctrl-A Ctrl-C
before hitting submit,to copy what I am submitting to the cache. Anywhere on the internet. (That’s on my Windows machine. Use your apple-keys or whatever instead. My point is just that the problem is solved with just a keystroke.)
The back button trick doesn’t help if the computer crashes or if the power goes out! That’s where Lazarus has saved me much grief.
I see. If I compose long text and then I save its stages in a text editor. But, sure, if Lazarus helped you, all the better. :-)
I see. If I compose long text and then I save its stages in a text editor. But, sure, if Lazarus helped you, all the better. :-)
Yes, nlab.mathforge.org is an alias for the nlab. Once or twice the “proper” name has had problems and that’s the backup. I think that there are some places that use that as the proper link so you might get there by following such a link. But it’s the same nlab!
Like Marc, I use the Firefox plug-in itsalltext. This is much faster than Lazarus (although of course one can use both), and it will also take care of crashes, since it saves a temporary file … assuming that you remember to hit Save periodically! (or use an editor that saves automatically).
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