I have a small problem

Post Reply New Topic

Occasionally when I go to reply to a topic, it says 'Post ID not specified' or 'could not obtain topic watch information' so I resubmit it and then it posts twice.

After this happened a few times (the most recent, just now), I have learned not to resubmit, as it posts anyway (I didn't know if it did or not) and to just ignore it, but why does it keep happening and can it be fixed?

Thank you in advance.

The site software is very old and has some annoying intermittent bugs, with many reporting various low-level errors from deep inside the code. Most often these occur because it is being pushed way beyond anything it was designed to handle but unfortunately, any continuing development and bug fixing is no longer viable.
A complete replacement of the forum software is being worked on, but as yet there is no estimated completion date.

As you've discovered this particular bug can be ignored because in most cases, the post was successfully entered anyway.
When errors like these occur while reading content, clicking your browser's page refresh/reload button (sometimes more than once) is sufficient but when submitting posts, it can get more tricky and double posts frequently result.

A trick I use is instead of clicking on (say) "Post reply" with the left mouse button, click on it with the right button and select "Open link in new tab". Complete your post as usual in this new tab and if an error results when submitting it, selecting the previous tab and refreshing the page will probably show your post has appeared on the thread.
If not, on the tab in which you created your post, click the browser's "back" button to return to the post's edit window and click on the "Submit" button again. In most cases, this second attempt will succeed.
This is somewhat browser dependent (I use Firefox) but it should work with any other browser supporting tabbed windows.