This is an awful habit of PRT! I mean in your case it obviously crashed somehow but it happened to me several times that this stupid 12h loggout either deleted my unsaved work or at least stop many unfinished backtests.

Also when this loggout comes you have  2min (!?) to save or it exits without saving. So just being on the toilet or whatever is sufficient. Then can one wonder who wants to exit without saving (which is default)? If it has to exit every 12h it should at least save your work before exiting and have a function to pause ongoing backtests so one can resume them after logging i again.

Hi Grahal, separate topic created and posts moved as requested.

While I’m here, I agree the time left to decide saving or not when the software forces us to quit is too short in case we’re AFK, and this forced quit message shouldn’t happen while there’s an on-going backtest. So I would join suggestions for no quit message at all, or for more time if forced quit is unavoidable.

But to answer your question, even if it might just have been rhetorical, “Why would anybody / under what circumstances would we want to waste our valuable time by NOT saving our work before EXIT / QUIT?”, I met such circumstances and I wouldn’t ask PRT to make save a default setting before quitting, here’s why:

• it already has happened to me making a huge mistake by deleting the wrong code once (so not just the text of it for which I have a saved copy outside the platform anyway, but also all the default formatting which takes time to reinstall from scratch when your number of return variables is at the max allowed),
• deleting an entire working space by mistake also happened to me another time, these can take time to recreate too

Under such circumstances when realising my mistakes a few minutes later I was very happy being able to just quit without saving and restart from the previous save.

So, no auto-quit at all, or more time to quit, or the “at least give us a button so we can make our own choice”, I’d say yes. But wouldn’t go as far as “default save before exit” without choice. I prefer your suggestion to add a button, best way to make everyone happy, you’d probably choose “default save” for your session, and I could choose “default quit without saving” for mine.

I am back in contact with IG/IT Finance about this again today as am getting so annoyed about it

I got stuck into it with them few weeks back but they [IT Finance] via IG/numerous emails back and forth tested it and couldn’t reproduce any saving errors and I just told IG I haven’t got the time to keep going into it and left it at that but was disappointed in myself not pursuing it

Noobywan – I get your point but seriously I am more in agreement with GraHal – who wants hours of work to be lost due to this?

The issues you’ve mentioned I understand but for example a template layout issue – you are still sitting in front of PRT when you realise “oh what have I done this is a mess how do I get out of this?” and you can there and then exit PRT without saving

If you happen to have that realisation when you are off making a cuppa/away from your computer and PRT auto exits and auto saved your errors then I guess it is too late and tough luck

The reformatting of variables into a re-imported strategy must be a bore I would agree especially by the sounds of how many variables you have but at least you have the code manually backed up out of PRT but if the auto exit saved automatically you would also have the code saved in PRT where it should be and not lost! And you can make backups/duplicates in PRT too – I don’t know if variables are also duplicated/don’t think they are but at least you can do it once (or twice) and have the backup there with all variables ready to go in PRT where it should be if you messed up the original

I think the issue is ‘what exactly is the save button doing?’

is it saving the template layout?

yes I think so and that is about it…

is it saving edits to watchlists?

no I don’t think so

is it saving created strategies/indicators?

nope don’t think so

just what is it doing?

everything is saved when QUIT

I really think the default should be autosave and deal with the consequences if you made mistakes and wanted to back out of them as you pretty much will realise you are making a mess of things as you are infront of your machine and doing it and can exit without saving

As an option why couldn’t PRT save a copy (but this would only be the layout… right? nothing to do with strategies/indicators/screeners etc.) if there is no response from the user when it wants to auto exit?

As an IT tech if I were to work on a customers computer who weren’t at their desk and had a word document open and I could not find the user to ask them if it needs saving or not because I had to restart their machine I would save a copy/new filename of the document(s) and restart the machine – job done/no tears

I am going to point IG support to this article as well so they don’t keep saying I am an ‘anomaly’ as they have never heard of this problem from anyone else

I hope at least IT Finance can ‘see’ this problem or work out if it is a local Java issue setting or something on our machines

Re: the backtesting running for hours I don’t really understand why you would want to run a backtest for so long/why not just run the strategy in demo and see how it plays out over time but I guess I am not understanding what you are trying to do so will keep quite on that front..

Cheers

Max

Hi Despair – I guess you are not with IG if you are dealing directly with PRT (IT-Finance)?

I also did not add that I had something very weird like this happen too – when I logged in a few days ago my template was all messed up and sections missing – I eventually realised the ‘Trading’ menu at the top wasn’t there!

I quit and reopened and the ‘Trading’ menu re-appeared but my template layout didn’t and I went on to discover many custom settings I had made under Platform Options had been set back to default

Seems like some kind of a system roll back by the developers to me… I didn’t even bother complaining about it at the time but have included it in my latest support request

Commiserations man, we’ve all been there and it really hurts to lose a half day’s work like that. I have also made appeals to PRT re this issue, but in the meantime I try not to take any chances. Especially now with v11 where backtests seem to take forever, it’s just demoralizing to lose hours of work. If I’ve done a lot of coding I copy and paste it into Notepad++ on a regular basis and certainly before closing. If it’s optimizations then I make paper notes or take a screen shot of the opt box.