The disappearing reply
 

A few times (4-5) lately, during a reply I'll hit the backspace button followed by a letter button. This causes the reply screen to disappear, never to be seen again. The original thread to reply to stays.

Perhaps I'm hitting a combination of keys??

Anyone know any magical words? The ones I use aren't magical and certainly don't work.

Thanks.

What browser and version (IE5.5, NN4.75, etc) are you using and what operating system are you on (WinXP, Win2K, MacOS9, etc)?

So, you're entering your reply in the reply field, and when you hit your backspace key the reply field disappears? Or does the whole window blank out?

I'm using IE with AOL 7.0. Windows 98.

I'm typing and hit the backspace key (and I think another key adjacent to it at the same time) and then the whole reply window disappears, leaving the original thread. It is not minimized and I've closed/minimized all other windows and it's not there.

Perhaps it's a FT feature to prevent dumb replies? Which would explain why it's happening to me. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif

Well, it's definitely not a feature we know about http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

One thing to test for is that the backspace(+ other key) combo you're hitting may be telling AOL (or your IE) to go to the previous page; a navigation shortcut, in other words. I know that on the Mac, if you're filling out a form and hit the shift+backspace key combo to return your cursor to the start of a line of text, what actually happens is that the previous page loads from your browser's history. I do it constantly... followed by a V8 forehead slap.

Thanks for the help Dan.

After playing around a bit here's what I found:

Hit the Tab key followed by the backspace and the reply screen goes away. It doesn't do this for the other screens though - just the reply screen.

Why can't I stumble on useful things??? http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif