Ebay's private messaging system has a particularly nasty problem which I call the "Pink Screen Of Death" for obvious reasons. Every so often when you've finished composing your message or your reply and click on "Send Message", instead of said message or reply being uploaded to the server, you are rudely presented with the following screen, and the message which may have just taken you 30 minutes or more to write has just disappeared into the ether forever, never to be seen again. ๐
This is NOT an isolated occurrence and had happened to myself and at least 3 other members that I know of on a fairly regular basis over the past several weeks, and I for one am totally fed up with having to rewrite fairly lengthy messages which have already taken me 30 minutes or more to have written the first time. Because I have absolutely no faith in the eBay programmers' ability to solve this problem I have developed a workaround which prevents one's message from being lost forever should the above error occur.
1. When creating or replying to a PM enter your message into the relevant window as normal.
2. When finished, press CTRL-A to highlight the message, then CTRL-C to save it to your clipboard.
3. Click on "Send Message" as per normal, and all being well, your message will be sent as it normally should.
4. If it fails and you get the "pink screen of death", click on "Return to my original page" and it will reset to the original message.
5. Click on "Reply" or "Compose New Message" once again, and this time, press CTRL-V, which will paste your original message (which you saved earlier) from the clipboard into the relevant window.
6. Click on "Send Message" again and this time it should work as per normal and your message will be uploaded.
7. If it fails a 2nd time, repeat Steps 4 to 6 again (I've never had one fail twice in a row, but that's not to say it'll never happen).
This workaround has literally saved me several hours of work by not having to retype replies or message which have been lost due to the appalling software which we are being forced to use on this site, but it shouldn't be necessary. Ebay should pull their collective fingers out and fix this problem once and for all. How about it, eBay?
