The double-whammy: Can't find work on one's career profile when one can't find work

Question

I spent an hour updating various segments of my profile on the Careers site, saving my work on each bit as is required in order to move to the next bit. I checked my public view occasionally; all the changes were present. I finally came to a breakpoint, pleased that I had made some useful improvements... and then lost all my changes with one mouse click.

My semi-ironic title derives from the notion that when one is looking for work (a job) it is especially bad when the work (composing one's career profile) one has done to help just vanishes.

Here are the steps to reproduce this:

1. Do some edits to one's career profile, using the Save button for each section you edit.
2. Press the browser back button.
3. Press the browser forward button to return to the career profile.
4. Result: all changes are gone! Tested in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Thankfully I had been staging my edited text in my text editor so to fix this I had only to take each chunk from my text editor and re-apply it to the correct segment of my profile, plus remember what other tags and small changes I had made. My redo time was only about 10 minutes but it could have been a lot longer.

That was yesterday. As I sat down to compose this today with some further checking I discovered that changes are not erased--just not displayed! So the workaround was simple:

Refresh the page and all changes will be restored!

I am not sure what the best fix for this should be, but I do know it was very disturbing to encounter. Since I found the workaround this is now relegated to almost trivial status for me, but I am posting this in the hopes that it may save others from an unpleasant experience.

Answer 1

This is a browser caching issue -- the browser simply showed you the version of the page that was in your last request to the server. Thus the refresh worked.

I'll add a little cache-control to try to prevent it. Thanks!