So there we were, surrounded by hostiles. Orcs to the left, orcs to the right, orcs in front of us, all-slaying fire in the sky, unbreakable stone at our feet, our backs to a wall. Our fighters held off the hordes as best they could but it was a fighting retreat, our mages were spent - and...
Notepad, but most of my games are online via chat (Skype & IRC) these days. Or sometimes just set up a template on a wiki - for instance, FFRPG SeeD has a character sheet template for wikis since many players use one to organize campaign info.
For me it's been that the GMs lose interest fast. There are a variety of reasons, but whatever - the GM simply stops posting in the game's IC threads after 1-3 months. Sometimes there are no posts in the OOC threads, sometimes they have (broken) promises to post. A month or so of confusion...