WordPress: Your attempt to edit this post has failed

There are usually two areas that can cause problems and errors in a WordPress blog. The first are plugins that produce incompatibilities or display errors while the second are problems after updates of the blog software itself.

There have been some problematic messages occasionally when trying to publish posts lately. The error message Your attempt to edit this post [..] has failed appeared occasionally after upgrading to WordPress 2.7. WordPress was not able to publish the article which was bad enough but the underlying problem was that all work up to the point of the last auto save was lost as well.

This usually meant that the tags, categories and other last minute edits (like urls) were missing from the posts and had to be added again. The second edit and publishing always succeeded without difficulties.

The first thought was that this could have something to do with the automatic saves of posts before publishing. A quick research on the WordPress support forum seemed to confirm that.

The fix is apparently the following:

Locate the file post-new.php in the wp-admin folder of the WordPress installation. Find the following line in that file wp_enqueue_script('autosave'); and replace it with //wp_enqueue_script('autosave');.

The // in front of the row make the entire row a comment which essentially means that the command will not be executed. This will practically disable auto save during post publishing meaning that you will hacve to click on the Save Draft button before you leave an unfinished post page.