Sometimes entire posts don't come through. No matter what you write your resulting post is just what you've quoted. Something in the code is messing up along the way.
My solution to this problem is to go back, copy my entire post, go forward, edit the post that just failed, and paste in the revised version.
Surely there must be a way for this to be done automatically (or somehow otherwise solved), because a lot of people are frustrated here after writing long and thoughtful posts, only find them not come through.
Yep, apparently this happens when you take more than 15 or 20 minutes to write a post.
But it doesn't ever seem to be an issue in the "quick reply" on the bottom of a page - just the full reply window.
All this said, it should not be our job to troubleshoot and come up with makeshift solutions for this...