Opera Portal reverted to default

I logged in to my Opera Portal page yesterday, the one I spent a couple of hours last week customizing with RSS feeds and content that I wanted on a portal page, and all of my stuff was gone. Since Opera does not offer support for their product, I am turning to the community for an answer.
I cleared the Opera cache and cookies over the weekend, but that shouldn't have anything to do with my customized Opera Portal, since I have to log in to see my stuff. At least that is how most portal sites work. What happened to my customized portal? If I spend the time to customize it again, will it all get dumped again?

And have you read this?

Of course I read it, it is my post! And rather than try to help, all anyone did was tell me I posted in the wrong place and complained too loudly. How would anyone know where the right place to post is, since there is almost no reference to Opera Portal anywhere in this forum? Am I the only person who actually uses Opera Portal?

To the point, I customized my portal. I logged out and back in numerous times and it was still the way I customized it. Then after clearing cookies & cache, I logged in and my customizations were all gone. I am asking what happened? Was there a glitch in the servers that store our portals? I guess no one will know since the people who develop and maintain the Opera browser are too busy to bother communicating with those of us who actually use it every day. I do not want to spend a lot of time setting up a portal the way I like it and then have it all disappear for no reason. I do not want to recommend that my friends, who may or may not already use Opera, create their own portal if it is all going to get dumped.

Does anyone else use the portal?

Has anyone else had any problems with their customizations being lost?

Where are the portal customizations stored?

What happened between 27 November 2011 & 28 November 2011 that caused my portal setup to be dumped?

What precautions can I take, and what precautions is Opera.com taking, to prevent anyone else from losing their custom page?

Thanks for any and all help.

Originally posted by Sidizen:

Does anyone else use the portal?

I don't. But for the sake of troubleshooting, I have logged in and did a small test.

Originally posted by Sidizen:

Has anyone else had any problems with their customizations being lost?

Not yet, so far. I have made a small customisation, quit Opera, restarted Opera, cleared postal.opera.com cookies (cache set to clear at exit), and logged in again. The customisation was still there. I then repeated the steps with additional steps to clear all opera.com and my.opera.com cookies (effectively logging myself out here, too), and relogged in to the portal and the customisation was still there.

So I have to conclude your problem is either one of server side glitch or there is something in your settings/ user environment that triggers it.

I suspect that their server hiccuped. I noticed that the page they load for me now isn't quite exactly like their default page, a couple of panels have switched places. It looks like the backup copy they made of my portal, that is supposed to protect our customizations from being lost, was not the same as the current version that got lost during their hiccup. That's the most logical explanation I could think of, anyway.

I went ahead and made another customized portal and I guess I'll just hope they don't dump it again. Sure would be nice to get some type of an explanation from the people running the server, though. Thanks for your time and input.

Sidizen I agree sometimes people here won't help you and just say you posted on the wrong place but sgunhouse answered you completely (your your topic, the one I linked) and you didn't provide any new feedback:

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

If you have questions about the portal, they go in the "My Opera: Feedback, questions and discussion" forum. This forum is about customizing the Opera web browser. However ... the portal recognizes who you are by cookies, if you block cookies from that page you can't customizing it. If you empty your cookies, you'll have to log back in to the portal (which is separate from this site even if you can use your My Opera username to login there) before you can see your custom page.

I hope the administrators at Opera can help you.

Thanks Rafaelluik. I didn't reply to sgunhouse in the other thread because I had already started a new thread here. (I don't see any way to move a thread or combine multiple threads) Plus, his solution was that I needed to log back in. My original post clearly explains that logging in did not retrieve my customized portal. So he obviously didn't understand the problem completely.

The good news is that it seems like it was a one time glitch. I haven't had any problems with my customizations being lost again.

Unfortunately, I think I found a persistent problem with imported RSS feeds not updating. I'm gonna start a new thread on that topic.
Here it is.

Originally posted by Sidizen:

My original post clearly explains that logging in did not retrieve my customized portal.

It doesn't. But that's ok now.

Well no wonder he didn't understand the problem!