Major Design Flaw in Forum

This forum has a major design flaw. I would just like to point it out so that you can investigate the matter and see about some improvements.

I just spent a good half hour writing a fairly detailed set of questions about a situation I am experiencing. I filled in the Captcha and clicked Preview. While making some corrections, I noticed that the Captcha had changed and my guess at the Captcha had blanked out. That was already annoying - I don’t know if I had guessed the original Captcha wrong or had just been too long making corrections - but I simply tried the new Captcha. I have cataracts in both eyes and the second Captcha was considerably harder. I made my best guess and clicked on Post. The result was a page saying that I’d guessed the Captcha wrong. Okay, fair enough, I expected it might take a few tries to get it right given the cataracts.

Imagine my frustration when clicking on “Back” - the only option I could see - took me back to a BLANK “New Topic” screen!! All the work I had done to lay out my situation and state clear questions was gone and I was back to a blank screen.

In case the design flaw is not obvious, let me state it. In my considered opinion, the Captcha checking should NOT lose the poster’s question! If the Captcha is guessed incorrectly, the poster’s question should still be there, unchanged, and the user should simply try the Captcha again until he gets it right. A maximum number of attempts at the Captchas may be reasonable but the code should most definitely NOT lose the entire post and force the user to re-compose the entire message.

I too believe that the original content should be retained if the capthua is incorrect or missed, but I’m not sure if the forum software treats it in the same way as form completion with required fields checked first, before the Post instance which would clear the data.

The capthua instances should now have ended for you as it is only applied to new users for the first 3 posts (anti-spam measure).

Yes, you’re right, I’m no longer getting captchas when I create new posts. Thank goodness!

Deleting the entire post simply because the Captcha is incorrectly guessed is just horrible design. I’ve had the same experience on one or two other forum sites as well. I can’t figure out what the designers were thinking! It’s as if it never crossed their minds that someone might have trouble with the Captcha and might have spent a lot of time composing a question.

I can’t be the first person to have noticed this and mentioned it but maybe the comments were never passed to whoever created the forum software. My impression is that there are a relatively few forum programs out there and sites that offer forums all choose from the same few programs. I’m assuming that many different sites use this same forum software, which is why I have seen the same problem elsewhere. Do you have any idea which program this site is using and what version it is? Maybe I should contact the developers of the forum software directly rather than belly-aching here if my comments aren’t going to get passed on to the developers…

I’ve had this happen to me on several forums and it’s terribly frustrating. Now I always create my posts in WordPad first, if they’re long or detailed.

@ HenryCan
I used to always use Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C to copy the content of the reply window, just in case there was a failure during the post.

Some formulate the post off-line, I used to do that also when I was on dial-up.