When using the Preview button in the Home Updater forum (SMF 2.1.4), I have been encountering the status message "Fetching preview ..." where the preview of the message is never returned and the status message remains indefinitely on the screen.
In these situations, the options I have used to recover are: (1) copy/save the text of the draft message to the clipboard, cancel out of the current topic, and restart the reply or new topic using the text saved in the clipboard, or (2) click on the Post button while the preview is stuck being fetched which will post the current draft of the message and clear the status message and then do a quick edit of the post if necessary to make any changes.
This is an intermittent problem, but not infrequent.
You might get more information by downloading and running Sysinternals Process Explorer.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer
Right-click on the process, select Properties, and then select the Threads tab.
Post a screen shot.
Quote from: dking02 on June 05, 2025, 11:11:39 PMWhen using the Preview button in the Home Updater forum (SMF 2.1.4), I have been encountering the status message "Fetching preview ..." where the preview of the message is never returned and the status message remains indefinitely on the screen.
In these situations, the options I have used to recover are: (1) copy/save the text of the draft message to the clipboard, cancel out of the current topic, and restart the reply or new topic using the text saved in the clipboard, or (2) click on the Post button while the preview is stuck being fetched which will post the current draft of the message and clear the status message and then do a quick edit of the post if necessary to make any changes.
This is an intermittent problem, but not infrequent.
That's odd I can't repro this, maybe enable browser tools on the page and view the network tab in the browser when you try to click preview and let us know what you see.
Thanks. I was hoping that someone else might have encountered or be familiar with the problem. I will try to capture more info the next time I encounter the problem. I don't know if there are cases where this problem is repeatable.
Given that the forum is hosted on a server running Simple Machines Forum (SMF) software, all that is required on the client side is a browser capable of handling the dynamic web pages (HTML5 and CSS3) generated by the forum server. It appears that in some cases the server is not generating or not returning the updated web page with the rendered preview. Not much can be done on the client side to resolve forum problems, other than possibly clearing the browser cache, disabling extensions, or changing browsers or machines.
After posting the preceding message, I experienced the "Fetching preview..." problem when replying to another message. See the "Preview post" section of the attached screenshot. The page being displayed is: forum.patchmypc.com/index.php/board.54/action.post2.html. The occurrence seems random.
@dking02 When you first mentioned this, the forum was running on SMF 2.1.4. In the meantime, the forum software has been updated to SMF 2.1.6. Could you please let us know if you are still observing this issue in the current version?
I had another case of the subject problem on Monday, 31-Aug-2026 and have reopened this topic.
In addition to a draft message hanging with a "Fetching preview . . ." preview status, I found I could trigger a server error message by trying to post the message without a preceding preview. I documented this in an email sent to
[email protected] as requested in the server message. That email bounced as Undeliverable - Recipient not found.
As explained in the original email (pdf copy attached with undeliverable receipt), this appears to be related to a limit on the number of characters in the message.
I have also attached the text of the original message I was trying to post as a sample of a message which triggers this problem.
On Tuesday, 01-Sep-2026 @ approx. 2230 & 2300 Pacific time, I experienced an additional occurrences of the 'Fetching preview ...' problem - this time when drafting this and another reply. In these cases, the problem would occur when trying to display a preview of the draft and would not occur the next time I tried to display the preview of the very same draft (after having saved the text and reloaded the web page). Therefore, the occurence seems random and possibly related to other loading on the server or some other system issue, in addition to possible sensitivity to length of the message as mentioned earlier.
This situation is quite annoying. Please fix.