When you see "We are experiencing some problems, please try again later," after writing a careful, thoughtful paragraph, what can you do?

Copy. Refresh page. Paste.

Sometimes it's already posted and the refresh will show it (wonky browser issues give me this problem). Sometimes the Q is deleted, and that's why I get the error message. Most of the time I just need to refresh the page and everything is okay.

I do more or less what Andrew and Madame M do - try submitting it again, and if that doesn't work after a few attempts, copy it, refresh the page, paste it in and have a few more goes at submitting it.

It's worth noting that if the question is anonymous and the questioner has blocked you, the site will allow you to type in an answer, but then will display the "we are experiencing some problems" message every time you try to submit it. So when I answer an anonymous question, I sometimes type a short answer, and if that's accepted, edit it into what I really wanted to say.

(And of course I had problems submitting this answer, though just for the sake of variety it was because my Internet connection glitched.)

Urgh! I hate that, too. The best thing to do is highlight the text and copy it before you even hit submit, but it's a hassle. If the text is still around after hitting submit, you can copy and paste it into a word processing file. Usually, for me, it goes through, and a few seconds later when I hit submit, it says something like "you've already posted that".

I must be a masochist to stay on this site, but I enjoy seeing the range of human emotions involved, and there's a small pleasure in a good answer, no matter what the receiver does with it.

You can copy what you wrote before submitting it to ensure that you won't lose it if there's an error, that's the first bit of advice. Secondly, you can simply hit the submit button again and chances are you will receive a "You have already answered this question" message, meaning that once you refresh the page, your answer will have been saved. This site has been plagued with problems from Day One and it seems as though it's only getting worse all the time, but there are ways around some of the more common issues. Lately I'm being bombarded with "Your answer has been chosen as the best answer!" messages for questions posted a year ago. I'm not sure if that bodes well or not. My latest peeve is having to go back through my answers to ensure that the apostrophes have been saved. I can't stand those goddamn spaces between the tails of contractions and the hanging "s" at the end of a possessive.