(dear stephen_33 - Sorry mate: I thought I'd submitted that a week ago. How bloody imprecise of me! Now where's that whip...)

Dear timbeau, have you finished with that whip yet ?

If so, are you still getting those reminders about previewing your posts ? I'm running Chrome as well but I've never seen one & they sound useful - have you lost any posts since getting them & previewing your work ?

I'm not getting much useful feedback from the staff on this one either, which is unusual because they're generally pretty good. I don't see this problem being fixed any time soon !

Of course if more people reported it when it happens....

It has happened to me quite a few times while entering long comments in vote chess games. And some of my friends have also faced this. What we do is after we've finished writing the long post, press CTRL + A and select everything, and copy it with CTRL + C. And now submit the comment. If it disappears, you can simply paste the entire thing again and submit the comment. You can use this even to copy diagrams. 

Yes, if you remember to do this every time you even remotely suspect that the time has been too long, then it's a work around, but the problem still exists.  Can't see why not to just fix it.

Just to be clear, this is not a bug. It happens on many sites that I am on. It is an issue caused by being automatically logged out when a lack of activity (in the form of sending information) occurs for a certain period of time. The point of this is to help the servers from lagging out. Otherwise there would be those times where people have a page opened for a long time, go answer the phone, watch tv, eat a cat, etc and never log out! The server would lag like crazy!!

When you type a loooooong post, make diagrams, or anything like that, you will get logged out. When you then finally send some info to the server to say that you have not spontaneously combusted in the last hour and a half, you log in again, and your post is gone!! There are several ways to combat this:

1) press "back" on your browser, this doesn't work 100% of the time, but it works many of the times and all of your unsent ramblings are nicely intact.

2) Use "notepad" or some other program to type into first. Personally I hate this option and as others have said, is useless if you are doing diagrams.

3) Copy + Paste constantly (very annoying solution, but less annoying than notepad)

4) Install cache plug-ins to your browser such as "Lazerus." You can find them with your Google friend. They will literally cache EVERYTHING you type, so it is a good idea to change the settings to auto delete things after 24hrs, a week, or whatever suits your fancy so that your internet doesn't need a walking frame to keep moving. This is the BEST SOLUTION that is out there.

I too have used the 'back' option on my browser sometimes as said by Disgruntled_Sheep to recover a few lost posts. I forgot to mention it earlier. 

Ah finally, a logical reason for why it happens!  Thanks DS!

Gonna have a look at this Lazerus thingy :-)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lazarus-form-recovery/loljledaigphbcpfhfmgopdkppkifgno?hl=en

Brilliant.  Thanks again DS!  

No worries at all, I have to admit that it's the first time that somone has said that I provided a logical explanation when I mentioned eating a cat. 

Just an added thought, I haven't tested this with the diagrams, but it works a treat with everything else.

I can't seem to add it... when I click on "ADD TO CHROME" it just changes to "CHECKING" and goes no further.  I'll keep trying though :-)

Maybe some people might eat cats ?? ^_^

that's ok, cats eat people too.

keep the long post lost idea!

it saves having to read enormously long BS posts.

in fact, since some have learned to type faster, why not shorten the time to annihilation ?

Yes, it can reduce the amount of long BS posts for sure, but unfortunately, that means a lot less long excellent posts :-P

unfortunately yes

The joys of modern technology!

Yup!

Tell me about it !   I've just updated my Java & suddenly I can't view games on Chessgames.com - my next job is to sort that out