At about 1:53 my time the site went down for slightly over 30 minutes. I lost a thread I had put a lot of work into and which was fairly important to the plot of part of my story, just 'poof' gone. Now I find myself having trouble recapturing the emotions and situations that drove the scene, and as a result feeling like, even though I can remember large parts of the dialogue and description, if I try to rewrite it it just won't be the same... Does any one else get this feeling when this happens, and if you do what do you do about it?
I would recommend writing offline in Wordpad, Editor, Word or a writing tool. For my own work I use Wordpad and also organize and backup everything offline. (to maintain the tree structure I let <Story> spread into <Story-a>, <Story-b>... spreading in <Story-aa>, <Story-ab>, ... , <Story-ba>, <Story-bb>, ...) I usually don't write a whole thread in one day and therefore have to save the content offline. If you still want to write directly on the site, you can copy your work to clipboard before sending it. You can also open a new window and "proof", that the site is online at that moment and you are still logged in. If you have the site still open, it could work, if you wait until the site is back online (proof in another window) and hit the back-button in your browser. I tested it by entering text and switching to my profile and hitting the back-button. Answer and following question were lost, but the write your thread was recovered. Not sure, if this is done by the browser or chyoa.
My browser normally does that too but it didn't this time: however, much to my delight, while the narrative was not quite the same when I decided to try to rewrite it while it was still fresh in my mind, I think sending it through that 're-write' actually ended up improving it!
Had a recent lost thread where my login session expired. This one might be OK to lose/rewrite, but it was discouraging.
Had this happen several times back on CHYOO and it drove me nuts. The constant timing out killed several of my longer threads. Not it is habit to copy every thread I write before I hit add thread just in case I get timed out again.
I use a wiki to hold my writing before I post it to CHYOA. My process is such that I might start a thread and not finish it for a month or more. Or I might finish it in a sitting.
