Ontological Disproof of God

[emjay]

Sure, I'll get on that in a minute... I shouldn't have removed it. But I don't understand your second question, can you rephrase?

But I don't understand your second question, can you rephrase?

I resolved the question, which I now see from the above that the question did not go through in a complete form.
I have now see that I was being whipsawed by two different positions which have been expressed here, i.e., that no BB code is necessary to reply to members; and, that there is BB code which is required.  Losty informed me that I had done three pages correctly, and, thus, I simply went back to doing it the way which I find works.

Ah, okay. Basically it would help to understand the BBCode but it's not in theory necessary. The reason is because the normal mode of editing/replying to posts... the mode without the BBCode... is just a 'front end' or 'GUI (graphical user interface)' for the BBCode. In other words, whenever you do something in the graphical mode of editing, all it's really doing is adding the required BBCode behind the scenes, which you can see by looking at it in 'source mode'. For instance if you want make some text bold like this, you can do it in the normal, graphical mode by selecting the text you want to bold, then clicking the Bold button... just as you would in say Microsoft Word... and doing that will make the text graphically appear bold in the editor... but doing that is really just a user friendly way of adding the required BBCode tags to the underlying source of the post, and which you can see by looking at 'source mode'. So you have two ways of doing the same thing; either graphically or not, but both result in BBCode being added to the source of your post... the only difference is whether it is being added automatically by the GUI, or you are adding it manually in source mode.

I just spent a tremendous effort writing Abaddon a response to his morning  post on my thread, and, after finishing it up in Preview Post, when I pressed Post Reply, it vanished into thin air; this happened before, and, then, after a bit, the writing did appear correctly on the thread.  Losing all that writing is devastating.  I am going to have to start voice recording all my serious replies so that they are not lost by the treacherous Preview Post process. Negatio.

That's not a problem of preview per se; ie I think the same thing would happen if you directly posted the same content without previewing. Basically, whether previewing or posting, the program must first successfully parse the source of your post. If it cannot do that, for instance because there are broken or incorrectly written tags, then it is likely to fail to post correctly in one way or another, as you're seeing.

I understand how frustrating it is to lose large parts of your post. It's happened to me before as well, so if I'm writing a long and complex post I usually make a backup in a text editor. And to reduce the likelihood of it happening, I prefer to use source mode only, which doesn't automatically attempt to add or correct your tags. But obviously that's not going to work for you if you're not comfortable with using BBCode directly.

Anyway, IMO the most likely reason you're losing large parts of your posts is due to both the program failing to correctly parse your posts due to malformed tags... since you're messing with them so much... as well as the program attempting to correct those broken tags and failing at that as well, by for instance, adding a closing quote tag because it can't find a valid one to match the opening tag, or vice versa.