It's not a bug, it's a feature... more or less.

The page displaying writeups isn't a discussion type node. If you look at the URL, you'll see it's quite different.

Now, the writeups form is quite separate from the chatterbox form, they don't share the same parameters. Therefore, when you click on talk, the page is regenerated, but the writeup form loses all its parameters.

At this point, default values are invented for the writeup form, and if you look at the code you'll see that a random name from a fixed list of users is chosen. That's all it is, nothing mysterious.

Similar things will happen in all sorts of places. You can't vote and talk at the same time, or consider and vote in the poll at the same time, or uncheck a message on the second or deeper page of Seekers of Perl Wisdom... and expect to get back to the same place.

This is because Perl Monks is based on the Everything engine, which uses the concept on nodelets and containers to lay out the page. A form is wrapped up (along with its submit button) within a nodelet.

What one would need to do would be to arrange things so that nodelets only defined their input fields (with names that didn't clash), and at the very bottom of the page, there would be one honkin' big button that would be entitled "just do everything".

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g r i n d e r
print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u';