Google Sites Woes

Editing on google sites is a known issue: oftentimes one will be in the middle of editing an entry in the wiki when this error shows up:

Wwhile there is not a complete solution to this issue, there are some steps you can take to ensure that your work is not lost when this error shows up.

First of all, click the reload button and your browser will display a warning prompt that your changes have not been saved, and will ask you if you are sure you want to reload. Importantly, do not reload the page here. You will lose all of your work. Instead, click cancel, and copy your work into your clipboard and onto a temporary storage area, such as Apple Notes or Google Docs. Once the content of your work has been saved somewhere, you can reload the browser. When Google Sites has refreshed, ensure that your internet connection is stable, then copy the work that you have stored elsewhere and paste onto Google Sites again. You may have to reformat your work. 

To minimize the amount of times that this error shows up, you should:

Publishing

In the top-right corner, there is a purple Publish button. Publishing updates the public wiki (vrwiki.cs.brown.edu) with all changes currently saved on Google Sites. It is not required to publish to save your work. Rather, you must ensure that the top navigation bar says "All changes saved". 

 In fact, if the navigation bar says "Saving...", and you press publish, it can prompt a loading screen that is impossible to exit. Thus it is recommended to only press publish if the navigation bar says "All changes saved".  

If it has displayed "Saving..." for more than five minutes, then your work is at-risk of being lost . As above, I'd recommend copying over your changes to your clipboard and Google Docs. 

If you're dealing with persistent slow load times:

Try working with only one context box at a time. While saving, you'll see a context box like below:

This means that the file is still saving, and if the page crashes, then your work will not be saved. Do not open a new context box until the saving status has changed to:

Google Sites will let you copy an entire content box, and while you can't paste it anywhere outside of Sites if it has non-text content, you should be able to paste it back into the place where you were working in the site on, so you can safely hit "Reload."

Note that you can't use the right-click, but that you have to hit "Command+C" (Mac) or "CTRL+C" (Windows). Then, use "Command+V" (Mac) or "CTRL+V" (Windows) to paste. As an example, I was able to copy this entire content block:

Contributors: Brian Kim (3/14/2023)