h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello,

I was editing my personal space, and then I previewed it. Oddly, it was all in plaintext (with all the <'s showing) and at the bottom, the "OK do it" button didn't say "Update Introduction" but "Submit New Entry". I was confused but clicked anyway, and now there's a new funny-looking entry that looked right a minute ago....

What just happened

Thanks.

Well your PS is still there (U221323, A988220) and your new entry with its plain text contents must be A4098288.

Is there any way you could have pressed the wrong button to start editing and just pasted in the contents you thought should be there (from an offline file)? Did you make up the address for doing the editing yourself at all? If both of those are no, then it could be that the system lost or failed to receive (on preview) the hidden information from the form which told it that an existing PS page was being edited and thus created a new page instead. Once you'd got to the submit new entry stage you were doomed.

NB The loss of the hidden information is especially likely if the editing form failed to load properly in the first place. There have been lots of pages failing to load properly lately. If you get an unfinished page it is much better to re-load it than risk using it. On posting a thread reply what would happen (on hidden information loss) is that you would start a new thread instead. So perhaps there have been more of those accidents around lately too.