I spent about 45 minutes crafting a lengthy post on education as a constitutional only to have the forum gobble it up and dispose of it.

When I wanted to save it as a draft, I got a nag screen to log in. I logged in, clicked back, and got the blank page to start a new topic.

Good thing I save my stuff in notepad every so often because I would not have had the energy to re-create 45 minutes worth of my grey matter smoking.

Can we opt to stay logged in please?

I'm really sorry about that Jean.

I know how it feels. It's happened to me, too, both here and other boards. It sounds to me like you've been a victim of the infamous forum cookie problem, which began when I added some new data to be stored in the cookies. Funny it should crop up again after all this time, But, if that's the problem you're having, then deleting the forum cookies so it has to write new ones should solve it. Let me know if that works.

You do have your option to stay logged in set, don't you? It's on my list to make that the default, but for now, we'll have to remember to check that box on the login screen.

I tried logging out and back in - I was not able to find a "logout" so I deleted the cookie from the link at the bottom of the page.

When I logged back in I saw an option to log me in automatically on each visit. I admit I had not checked that since every so often someone else uses the computer I'm on. All the same, it wasn't a matter of me not being logged in, I was logged in and it seemed like what happened was I got timed out.

Aaaaaaakkkkkkk!!! Can you believe I lost MY response to this thread? Not because of the cookie problem, but because of the link thing you brought up? I had half a dozen windows open and closed the one with my reply because I thought I had already posted it.

Anyhow, the drift of it is that what you described fits the cookie problem to a "T" and now that you deleted the cookie and got a fresh one written hopefully it won't recur. But if it does, I need to know and the circumstances, because that means it's a problem that's not gone yet.

Regarding the logout button, you might want to read this thread:
Where's the Logout Button?

I added it now to the recommended reading list:
Which Topics You Should Actually read

Hopefully the board's working smoothly for you now.

ETA - BTW, the "Delete cookies" link on the footer menu doesn't really delete the cookies. It just cancels the current session ID so the logged status switches to logged-out. To solve the cookie problem, you need to actually to DELETE the cookies using whatever tool is available to you. I'm assuming you know how to do that, but if not, let me know which browser you're using and I'll give you a step-by-step.

Seeing as how this problem has been resolved, the thread is closed.