How to make a post. How to make a draft. Why did it disappear?

You can make a post either by starting a "New Topic" or "Reply" to an existing topic.
To start a new topic first choose the section in the Forum that you want your thread to be. Then click on the "New Topic" button. In the Subject section put in your title. Make it specific enough for people to see what you are going to talk about without being overly wordy. You actually have more room to write than you think.

Next you can type in the Message Body space. Use the Emoticons on the left. You can double click them and they will be put at the end of where you are writing or you can click and drag them.

If you need to you can click on the calendar button below your post and add your event to the calendar. When you are finished then click the preview button to be sure that your post looks the way you want it to. Then click "Send" and your post is now in the forums.

You can post a reply by simply choosing any thread that you want to comment on and click the "Reply" button. Then follow the directions as above .

Sometimes you may not have time to finish your post or something comes up and you have to leave. Not a problem. Just hit the "Draft" button and your work will be saved. When you are ready to come back to it then all you have to do is go into your "Profile" and you will find your drafts. The Profile button is in the row of buttons at the top of this page.

Note: You cannot save as a draft a new topic. Only those posts that are a reply can be saved.

Sometimes people make a post and when they hit the "preview" or "send" buttons the post disappears.

Many websites have a time out. In other words if you leave the computer sit for a long enough time it will assume you are not working and log you out. This is done so that no one can come on your computer and get into your accounts if you should happen to forget to log out and leave your computer unattended. Even though you are typing in the body of your message the website is not registering that as being actively on the internet. In other words you are busy on the computer but not necessarily on the internet at that time. Bank accounts do this too. I have been in my bank looking over the activity and when I try to access another screen it says I am not logged in. There are some websites that never log you off. I have gone into some websites and find I am still logged in after not being there for for weeks or more.

I have had problems with writing a lengthy post only to lose it when I hit preview or even send. There are several ways to prevent this. The first and best way is to open your word program. That's the program in your computer where you write letters. Then you can take your time writing your article and doing the spelling. After you have the article the way you want it then copy it and then you can go to the forums and hit the "reply" or "new topic" button and paste your complete article in to the post. There is no problem with timing out because it is a simple cut and paste job. After you paste it in you can hit "preview" and see how it looks. You can add or adjust as you need.

If you do that remember if you are adding anything you may want to hit your "preview" button from time to time to keep letting the website know that you are still busy. Before you hit the "preview" button you may want to copy the message that you have in the post just in case you have made any adjustments and don't want to loose the changes. Even in this message I am typing now I copied it and hit preview once just to be sure I didn't loose it.

That is the other quick method. If you just want to reply then always copy the post you have written so far so that you don't loose it when you hit "preview" or "send" just in case you have taken longer than the time out.

This should probably make things run smoother for you.