Tips for publishing and NOT losing your articles

Over the past week or so, many Gather members have had the unfortunate experience of losing their articles upon trying to publish them.  After composing or editing an article, sometimes clicking the "Publish" or "Add images to your article" buttons would result in a blank white page.  Sometimes the article could be salvaged, sometimes not.

We also observed that this seemed to mostly strike people when they had been composing or editing for an extended length of time, so typically the articles that were lost had a lot of work put into them.  We're sincerely sorry if you were affected by this glitch, and lost some of your work.  It's an extremely frustrating thing to happen.  However, there's good news to report.

Our developers installed a patch yesterday afternoon.  You should now feel safe working in an open publishing or editing page for up to 3 hours.  However, if you plan on writing a lengthy article, you should ALWAYS check off the "keep me signed in" box when you sign in before publishing.  If you do not check this box, then you run a higher risk of losing your work.

For added security, you could also click "save as draft" every 20 minutes or so while publishing.

If you want to be super-safe, you might want to consider composing your article in an offline word processor, and then copying it only Gather when you're finished.