Money Claim Online - technical problems filing Defence - please help!

Firemunchkin

Hi all - long (long) story but I'm being sued by a boiler engineer who claims I haven't paid him for the work he's done but he hasn't actually finished it or provided an invoice. Trust me, it's a long story and the detail isn't important.

The deadine for me to file my Defence and Counterclaim is 2 January 2018 but I want to do so this weekend because my anxiety levels are through the roof. Trouble is, when I complete the "Defence" box and click on next, I get an error message saying:

"We are sorry, but your request has been rejected owing to one or more technical reasons."

It then says to contact the helpdesk but they're only open 9am-5pm Mon-Fri (not including bank holidays).

Does anyone know why this might not be working? I'm using the latest Firefox browser and I've not had any problems with this website using it so far. I am copying and pasting the text from a Word doc (having worked on it separately), could that be the issue?

Thanks so much in advance. I'd really rather not wait until the last day to file this.

docmatt

You may be entering too many characters. MCOL have a stupid thing where as you can only enter something like 1200 characters or 20 lines of text (but don’t quote me on that). I could be wrong but it might be that.
Try editing it as small as you can whilst retaining all the info. No need for a story, just facts.

giraffe69

the first thing i'd do is try with another browser to rule out a firefox problem.

fezster

If you don't manage to get it to work, take a screenshot of the error, and then keep it as proof in case you are delayed in submitting your defence.

Firemunchkin

Thanks - for the Defence part you have 122 lines. There's no guide on technical specifications so it was a process of elimination. I tried it in another browser - didn't make a difference. I thought it didn't like cut and paste - wrong. The error message doesn't have a code so I couldn't look it up.

I removed the bullets & numbering formatting and it worked. But only for a few paragraphs. Eventually I worked out that cut and paste is fine, maxing out to the full 122 lines is fine, but it doesn't like too many special characters or bullet & numbering formatting. I had a few special characters in the first 8 paragraphs, but then after that it wouldn't let me have any brackets, semi-colons, sometimes quotation marks etc. I just had to copy and paste each paragraph in slowly to work out which bit it didn't like and then change it.

Took ages and was extremely frustrating but it's done now thankfully!