Wo, I have such a mouse too, and I've accidentally pressed that damn side buttons way too many times. This site luckily appears to auto-save every few seconds though... so it's really weird that so much of your work disappeared. If you pressed the forward button to go back, that might have caused it.
usually if you go forward again to the same page and hit reply the work will appear greyed out in the reply box, then come back to black when you click on it...its not fool proof but it works most of the time
I for one can't make the greyed text disappear. Everytime I start a post with a block of quoted text then decide to delete it, it hangs around for months.
This isn't the only forum I've had it happen on, and it's really annoying. Doesn't always happen, but it does more often than I like. I'll either get used to this mouse, or I'll junk it.
There actually is a way to do it, that I stumbled on once. When you're in the Reply window, click on the little square icon to the right of the moneybag. It looks like a floppy disc. It's the last one before the left and right arrows for Undo and Redo. The options it gives are Save Draft and Delete Draft. If you want to get rid of all the grey text, first actually delete it, and then click on Delete Draft under that floppy disc icon. Next time you're in, the Reply box will be empty. That used to annoy the hell out of me too.
See, what I was thinking is, browsers like to load a cached version stored in memory when you go forward again, and that might be the version of the website from some minutes ago with the old version of your work. The JavaScript handling auto-saves might also save that older version you just reloaded from cache and overwrite the newer version. But if you reload, it should ideally load the auto-saved work straight from what is in the cookies. Modern browsers shouldn't do this though, they definitely shouldn't pull a really old version when you forward again instead of reloading from scratch (and thus having the engine re-render everything). There might be something weird about your browser, like an extension that might be interfering with either your cookies or the way caching works. Also, no need to throw the mouse away, there are ways to reprogram the buttons.
Yeah, I'll get round to installing Microsoft Mouse & Keyboard Centre at some point, I believe you can use that to remap the buttons.
Hmm, just happened again but this time, I pressed forward (the stuff I typed disappeared) then hit refresh, and most of it reappeared.
That kind of proves what I said, your browser is doing something wrong, and because you hit refresh quickly, you outran the JavaScript interval from auto-saving the outdated text in your cookies. Since the thread got moved and it wasn't on my watch list, I didn't see your message, but I'd really investigate the browser if I were you.