Attribute and Abilities Loss

I recently created and tested 3 macros on a journal entry in a new game I joined.  That was the Guild Living Campaign.  Then I logged in and here are the situational metrics: 1) The chat log does not scroll back far enough to reveal my testing of my macros so I can get the body of the templates back. 2) The 'View all chat entries for this game' function opens a new browser tab, but, fails to deliver a page. 3) My abilities, ie the macros themselves are place held.  There are abilities present as if I had pushed the add button and created the empty shells for those abilities. 4) The three new abilities are empty.  All the work done within the ability is lost.  (I did not do this) 5) The attributes I used within those abilities/templates are STILL THERE.  This also proves some work was done. So my question is ... is there a way to detect who deleted and when the macros?  Is there a way to retrieve the macro from the many tests I conducted within the old chat log session?  If the answers to both of these questions are no, can you guys fix that, ie we need a way to track these things for accountability and restoration purposes.

That sounds extremely frustrating! Only those with permission to edit a character journal can add/remove/edit abilities & attributes; you need to speak to your gamemaster(s) to find out if someone other than you and they has editing permissions for your journal.  There is no way to determine who made the changes to your character's journal, nor a way to restore the abilities you created short of rolling the entire game back to an earlier restore point. For your suggestions, we offer the Suggestions & Ideas forum, which is based on voting from the whole community.  Please review our Forum Voting wiki page for more information on how voting works, and our Suggestions & Ideas Posting Guidelines for the added expectations above and beyond our standard Code of Conduct .

One possibility that comes to my mind is that you made the macros (abilities) and, as I've done more times than I care to remember, failed to save them! There's a teeny tiny little checkmark that appears when you're editing the content of an ability macro, and if you don't click it the ability is not saved. Then you go back, sure you did something, but there's nothing there. At least, that's my theory.

And Phnord is right.  Here's a picture of what he is talking about: If you do not click on that check mark, your ability will not be saved.  Is this what could have happened to you?

OK Some testing ... As suspected I just checked 2 macros by hitting add, adding a name, a few garbage characters, add button again, name, few garbage characters.  THEN I CLOSED THE JOURNAL ENTRY WITHOUT HITTING THE CHECKBOX. Exited the journal entry and kept going ... modifying other journal entries. Went back into the old one and ... the macro is still there.  Seems pretty solid.  Granted the macro is open for editing but i am not looking for that right now. (You can even TEST these macros.  But they STILL are not saved.  Do you see how deceptive that is?) But, and this is the gotcha, despite them still being there, when I exit the session entirely they are lost.  That is a trap.   Clear truth - The default behavior of a macro SHOULD BE to prompt for save if ANYTHING entered or edited past what was there to start with (OnChange) happens.  This is vastly superior to allowing a person to change things and just assuming that although they can shut it, open it, work with other things, and still recall it at any time, they are aware that it is not saved yet.  This prompt would occur at any time the session was ending with changed yet unsaved information remaining.  This behavior is standard in many applications.   I acknowledge that I must have done it because I can reliably repeat the error.  I call it an error though because I feel that is an application level behavioral error.  I suppose I should enter this into suggestions but that also, as I have pointed out before, is a behavioral error.  Good suggestions that arise as a result of reporting errors should automatically be moved to the suggestions box via YOUR in-house processes, if they are mature.  It's called the Capability Maturity Model for a reason.  But I digress. Thanks for your help regardless.

As the mystery has been solved, I'll go ahead and close the thread.  Don't hesitate to start a new thread if you have any other questions or issues.