This question which was originally asked a week ago has been stuck on the front page of almost an entire day. Every time I open the MO front page I see this question "bumped" recently by drbobmeister, yet I don't see any recent edits at all by this user.

Is this a bug of some sort?

Ah, I see. I hadn't thought of that. Thanks Qiaochu.

So deleting your answer while you're editing it until you think it's ready for public consumption has unintended consequences. I've done that (only once, I think, and for no more than a couple of hours). There isn't any other good way to save half-entered answers, though.

Peter-

I wouldn't worry too much about this; it's mostly a matter of intent. If you really want to bump your question to the front page, you should think of something real to add to it, or at least be willing to accept the step toward community wiki. If you're just trying to save a half-written answer, I don't think anyone could take much issue.

Intriguing. There appears to be nothing that Joe User can do about this. It needs a moderator to lock the post. I can't even flag it for moderator attention!

So view this as a (public) flag for moderator attention. I recommend that this post be locked and that a (polite) message be sent to the user explaining what is wrong with what he or she is doing, and recommending that he or she compose their oeuvre off-line and post it when it is complete.

Looking at the edit history, I suspect that drbobmeister ("Can we fix it?") is trying to perfect his/her entry. If you look at the comments that Bob[1] leaves, you'll see that there is an epic story being written. I shall forebear from commenting on the content as it is deleted ...

In particular, it seems that Bob deleted his/her answer because it was accidentally posted before it was finished.

[1] Blackadder fans will recognise the fact that this is insufficient to specify gender.

Ladies and Gentlemen of MO:

Andrew Stacey was pretty close to the mark. I accidentally posted my answer before it was completed; then, as further comments rolled in, my answer started growing; I have been working on the answer on and off for awhile now. It was not my intention to have the question continually appear , to quote Willie Wong, "on the limited real estate of the front page"; in fact, I would much prefer that it hadn't. (I only noticed this myself relatively recently in its edit history.) I had assumed that, until posted, my comments would have little effect other than to be entered into and stored in the database. I was, as Ben Webster put it, "trying to save a half-written answer". Andrew Stacey also suggested composing the "ouvre off-line and post[ing] it when complete". This too I would prefer, but my laptop is bit of an antique and I haven't quite figured out how to install the necessary typesetting SW locally. I'm thinking if I could obtain MathJax and/or js.math I might be to rig something up, though I would apparently need an HTML form similar to what MO has to make the whole package run smoothly. Any suggestions along these lines would be appreciated. I'm a little surprised that there isn't an "edit and save" feature which allows online editing without any indication to the outside world. It might also be cool if the programmers could provide a downloadable web page which could run the parsers locally in MO format; this would provide a very smooth editing interface.

As for Qiaochu Yuan's comment on contact information, I'll check my profile and get back to this discussion. Meanwhile, I can be reached at drbobmeister@gmail.com.

@drbobmeister1: since you've been alerted to the problem, I've unlocked the post now.

An "edit and save" feature would be kinda cool, but it's not in the cards for us in the near future (we don't have the code, and the software is currently frozen). However, you can simply save your draft in a text file. Could you explain how a downloadable faux-MO interface would be better than the preview that is already provided when you edit a post? For long posts, you probably want to disable automatic math rendering, but then you can still preview your post without posting by clicking the "one-shot preview" button. I realize you still have to copy and paste to and from your draft file while you're working on your post, but otherwise this approach works pretty well for me.

Learn something new every day! Didn't know about that "save" feature on SE2.0.

It is certainly possible to get a local version of Markdown and do an "edit-compile" route with that. Although Markdown isn't an ISO standard, the variations are not so large. So you can get:

• Perl: at Daring Fireball and from Fletcher Penney
• PHP: from Michelf
• Ruby: from Maruku

and probably many, many more.

Of those, I would recommend using the Perl one from Daring Fireball. That's the original and so the one that most others are compatible with. The others have variously been extended and built out so something that works with one isn't guaranteed to work with another.

I do something like this when working on nLab pages: I have Emacs configured to run maruku on the document instead of latex and to view the result in firefox instead of xpdf. The only bit that would need changing for MO is to work out how to run mathjax on a local page (since the nlab - and also maruku - uses the vastly superior MathML, no additional scripts are needed to view the pages).

You don't need to do anything fancy to edit without bumping the question. You can just compose your answer in the MO answer box, preview it, and then cut-and-paste it to a file on your laptop to save. If you don't save it on MO, it won't bump the question. Then, when you're ready to continue editing, just copy-and-paste back to the MO answer box. Repeat until you're satisfied. Even the most technophobic users should be able to do this.

@drbobmeister: they look like this on my screen, and probably on Gerry Myerson's as well:

My guess is that your browser is adding linewraps where they don't belong and you don't notice because your screen is wider than ours.

There aren't any spaces before the linebreaks. When you compose a comment, you can format it as "Text" or "Markdown" (look just above the "Add your comments" button). If you use "Text", it respects linebreaks.

@drbobmeister1: an easy solution is simply format as "Markdown". I've just changed the formatting on your posts to Markdown.

Regarding a faux-MO interface. I think it shouldn't in principle be too hard to put one together since the preview is already basically a faux-MO interface. In other words, the preview is rendered entirely by your browser. The problem is that it's not possible to get MathJax to work locally without running a local web server. Perhaps this will change in the future.