Who added the expires now headers to PM posts?

[tachyon]

Up until about a week ago you could post a preview, check a link in it worked, click back to get to the preview and submit it if all was OK. It appears someone has decided to throw some expires now type headers into the response so you can't use back anymore (and as a result lose your post) I have not bothered to actually check that but it certainly behaves that way as of the last few days.

I would wonder that the avoidance of duplicate posts (if that was the logic) outweighs the utility of being able to check that links posted are valid before you commit a post. It is somewhat agravating to lose your posts if you forget you can't check links anymore.

[castaway]

While I don't know the answer to your question, I would suggest that you use your browsers 'Open link in new Tab/Window' feature, to check links. (Assuming you have a sane browser :) I wouldn't rely on any form containing its former values after navigating to other links and back. (It may work sometimes, but I have a feeling thats pure fluke.. :)

C.

[eserte]

'Open link in new Tab/Window' feature

... which can often be called with the middle mouse button, so there's no convenience loss.

[tye]

I have not bothered to actually check

Then I'm certainly not going to. I've had this problem on a quite inconsistent basis for a very long time. I now have my browser configured (well, IE, my other browsers either don't make it easy to do this configuration or have other problems that make me use them only for things other than PM) to *never* invalidate pages that are in its cache. It still does invalidate pages but only very rarely (probably because of some header, but I have not bothered to actually check since it happens so rarely for me now).

I did quite a bit of digging to try to figure out why IE and my phone's browser were so aggrevatingly fickle about when they'd insist on refreshing instead of just using what was clearly still in their cache. I never came up with an explanation (sometimes they'd be happy to show me a copy of a page I had fetch many days ago and sometimes they'd refresh when I was going "back" to a page that I had loaded just a few minutes or even seconds ago).

I'm working on merging patches to Everything/HTML.pm so we can start sending reasonable cache control headers in hopes of making this less of a problem, among other improvements (thanks, Corion).

Your problem probably has nothing to do with any changes at PM (I doubt we've made any, but I haven't bothered to check my recollection). You might want to bother to check now. Maybe you'll figure out something helpful.

[tachyon]

Thanks for the reply. I should have checked for the headers. As you and dermephq point out it must be local. I am suprised because I have not applied any patches or changed any setting in (IE) for a long time. I do run on a nearly 2 year old install of Win2K and it is startig to exhibit the usual unexplained flakiness. Probably time for an OS reinstall. Maybe next week ;-)

[jacques]

I always thought it would be nice to "mark" or "flag" posts that you wanted to reply to or read for later when you had more time to do so.

And, since this is a Christmas list, it would be nice to have a drafts folder where you could save drafts of your responses. Perhaps this folder could be periodically purged by the server. Scratchpad really is insufficient for this purpose.

[demerphq]

Ive had a look for patches that might be behind this and ive also looked at the content headers supplied by PM. I dont see any expiry header and I don't find any applied patches that this could have come from. Of the last 50 patches all but a few were by me, and none of them have to do with headers fwict. Certainly non of mine do.

So absent further info i'd have to say this probably local to you.

[schweini]

i'd just like to point out the most excellent Mozilla LiveHTTP extension, that makes checking for stuff like this really easy (as long as it's no in the meta-tags, etc.)