Question about saving errors in the web version

[Julia Goedecke]

Dear Numbas community,

does anyone else also experience these problems: When I am writing a
question in the web editor, and leave for a while (or my computer
crashes and I have to restart the browser), then the question has gone
back to a previous version, and also often the variables get all muddled
up and don't show the correct thing any more. Sometimes two variables
kind of get linked and one other one is completely disappeared, and also
a lot of my work just goes missing.

I've been trying to mitigate by putting checkpoints quite often, but I
still lose work when my computer misbehaves eg just before I was about
to do the next checkpoint.

Does anyone have any solutions to this problem?

Julia
--
www.julia-goedecke.de

[Ben Brawn]

Hi Julia, 

I've never learnt how to use checkpoints but I have had some errors of disappearing work. For me, this is usually because 

1. I've accidentally opened two tabs with the same question and if you do some changes to one and then go to the other and change anything that will override what you did on the other tab, or
2. numbas has logged me out due to inactivity or the server doing server things.

To mitigate the risk I usually keep tabs to a minimum so I don't lose them, and if I come back to a question after having a coffee or anything longer I refresh my tabs before working on them (this makes sure I am still logged in). 

My computer itself doesn't usually misbehave but most people don't close their browser tabs or restart their computer enough in my opinion.

[Julia Goedecke]

Hello Ben,
thanks for your thoughts. It isn't either of those two causes for me
though.

Best wishes,
Julia

On 24.03.25 23:03, Ben Brawn wrote:
> Hi Julia,
>
> I've never learnt how to use checkpoints but I have had some errors of
> disappearing work. For me, this is usually because
>

> 1. I've accidentally opened two tabs with the same question and if you

> do some changes to one and then go to the other and change anything
> that will override what you did on the other tab, or

> 2. numbas has logged me out due to inactivity or the server doing

> server things.
>
> To mitigate the risk I usually keep tabs to a minimum so I don't lose
> them, and if I come back to a question after having a coffee or anything
> longer I refresh my tabs before working on them (this makes sure I am
> still logged in).
>
> My computer itself doesn't usually misbehave but most people don't close
> their browser tabs or restart their computer enough in my opinion.
>
> On Monday, 24 March 2025 at 22:56:35 UTC+11 Julia Goedecke wrote:
>
> Dear Numbas community,
>
> does anyone else also experience these problems: When I am writing a
> question in the web editor, and leave for a while (or my computer
> crashes and I have to restart the browser), then the question has gone
> back to a previous version, and also often the variables get all
> muddled
> up and don't show the correct thing any more. Sometimes two variables
> kind of get linked and one other one is completely disappeared, and
> also
> a lot of my work just goes missing.
>
> I've been trying to mitigate by putting checkpoints quite often, but I
> still lose work when my computer misbehaves eg just before I was about
> to do the next checkpoint.
>
> Does anyone have any solutions to this problem?
>
> Julia
> --

> www.julia-goedecke.de <http://www.julia-goedecke.de>
>
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[Christian Lawson-Perfect]

I think the root of this problem is that the question data is included in the page HTML. If your browser reopens, it loads the original response from its cache instead of fetching the whole page again. We should change it to only fetch the question data in a separate request once the page and scripts have loaded.

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