It is highly unlikely that your system has been taken control over, "hacked", like many would call it. Hack a term which is really meant "to program or to write programmes" in the geek world, and is never associated with anything bad or undesireable, it is only in recent times and among the non-geek circles (made colloquial by the media, no doubt) that it has come to mean "to intrude into another person's system unauthorizedly"
The events you describe, i.e., of disappearing posts is not new!!!Has happened before, and to many people. It happens at random, and seemingly for no explanation.
My sense is it is being caused by repititive caching on the clientside. It has never happened to me even once, so I have never been able to replicate the problem on my systems either at work on several machines, using dfferent OS platforms, or at home, where I do not have many but at least 4 machines using 4 OS platforms.
If you are habitually going back in your browser using the "back" button, then this phenomenon will manifest itself without you realizing it, and it would demonstrate symptoms very similar to the ones you have described to me. Also, Hotmail is notorious for disappearing mail.
But because as a habit, I customize by browser cache settings, I have a feeling I invariably immunize my systems against repititive caching in the browser. And this in every browser I use, Netscape, IE, Mozilla, Opera, and my most favorite, the text-only Lynx.
How???
As follows:
1. For the settings "Number of Days worth of history to keep" I use the value of 0 (zero Days) so that no history is ever written to disk. It is not healthy for your system to keep huge amounts of unwanted data on disk, and it is certainly not healthy for the users to retain huge amounts of encrypted data in cache, since such encrypted paged may very well consist of the user's personal, critical, fincncial, health and other such extremely sensitive information.
2. Limit the size of the cache to a relatively small amount, say 16 MB --- I would be willing to wager that nobody would ever load anything from cache that was beyong this, even including the images, etc. particularly with the current trends in the WebSite building techniques being deployed, where just about every Website has at least one function (the most common being the current time) which keeps changing something in the content so the client browsers will reload the page anyway and not load from cache.
In Netscape this is done in Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced
In IE it would be under Tools -> Internet Options -> Settings (after deleting all offline content and cookies)
In almost all the browsers, there is one more thing you can do to make it ever more difficult for someone to, umm, "hack" into your system. *LOL*
In the same screen where you set the size for your browser cache you will see where you can change the location of your cache. I would strongly urge you to do that.
Habitually, again, on every system I build, I create a directory called Junk on the UNIX-based systems it will be a slice in the root slice :
/junk and in the Windoze based systems it will be C:\Junk
Into this directory I create a sub-directory called Inet and move all the browser caches into it. Anything that I consider waste but needs to be kept temporarily, I will dump into this Junk directory, and periodically delete the contents of it, keeping only the sub-directories.
Treat your computer like you would your home, just like you wouldn't want trash strewn all over and have a designated spot for your trash and have a designated place on your hard disk assigned for waste bytes.
I know I have said too much already, but it is still fairly early here, and I have just come out of a night which was filled with battles with the very people the likes of whom you were concerned about!!! Intruders who raid others' systems for personal gain. Just like every Friday night, our catch was rich!!! *LOL* and this morning there are at least some 31 very unhappy young "hackers" who perhaps are wishing they had never learnt computing. Eventually, they will learn, I bet some of them even move on to become fairly good systems engineers, who knows???
