EN.WP.ST47 wrote:

Are there still browsers that don't correctly preserve entered form text? I tried this a few times (navigating to different pages manually while there was data in the edit form) and it was still there when I got back on firefox 7, chrome 13, opera 10.

(also, the user mentions internet explorer, but has platform = Linux. ???)

• Bug 58642 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

omid_h28 wrote:

I don't understand why something this important has been ignored for long time.
Although it doesn't make problem in minor edits, It can discourage user in major editing.
It has most impact on new users who are not aware of session expiration.

I think this is fixed (a long time ago). I did the following (locally):

1. Log in.
2. Go to an edit page.
3. Make some changes
4. Delete all cookies for the site.
5. Click "Save page"

I get "Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still does not work, try logging out and logging back in." and a preview. Like a normal preview, the text is shown below and not lost.

I can then:

6. Log in again in a new tab or window.
7. Preview
8. Save

If this is still present for you, please give your browser (with version) and exact steps to reproduce (like the ones above).

(In reply to Matthew Flaschen from comment #4)

I think this is fixed (a long time ago).

As far as I remember the "Sorry! We could not process your edit" message has always existed (yep, found it; 2005, fdbdd7707ba98066456ea20892572b34d2ead649 ). I interpreted this bug as being about renewal of tokens and perhaps user sessions.

Comment 0 says "In a system where users must be logged in to edit", did you test that? I added it as step 0 in before yours (with a publicly viewable page) and I got the "view source" screen.

I tested, and I do see the "View source" page (so simply previewing after logging in is not an option). However, the changes are preserved in the "view source" box (it says "You can view and copy the source of your edits to this page", emphasis in original), so you can still copy them. I'll clarify the description and title accordingly.

This issue has lead to data loss several times in the last few weeks just on our Wiki. We are taking minutes of our meetings in the Wiki, and several of them have been lost because people's sessions expired during the meeting.

In these cases, when hitting "save", we did not get the "sorry you got logged out" message. Instead, after "save" we just got the login form directly, and then the data was lost.

This was with MediaWiki 1.34.0.

I was able to reproduce this my removing cookies while on the edit page. After clicking "submit", I am greeted by "you have to log in". The text is gone, and not even the back button brings it back.

This is an old issue, and I think the basic issue has been resolved long ago. There is also the recent addition of the Edit Recovery system which should ensure that even if someone doesn't read the warning ("You can view and copy the source of your edits to this page.") and navigates away from that page they'll still be able to recover their edit. So I think this task can be closed as resolved.

The only outstanding part is:

In T11749#6268780, @Ralfjung-mediawiki wrote:

when hitting "save", we did not get the "sorry you got logged out" message. Instead, after "save" we just got the login form directly, and then the data was lost.

I've been trying to replicate this, but I haven't been able to. Is it possible that you were using the ForceLogin extension? That redirects to Special:UserLogin if your not logged in (i.e. if your session has expired when you submit the edit form).