Update May 27 by JB
RD has posted that the policies page bug may be fixed.
RevolvingDork
Etsy Admin
RevolvingDork says:

With much help from the community here in the forums, we were able to track down the issue and reproduce it — it was caused by a combination of old listing expiration code and shop activity.

We believe we have rectified the issue completely now, but we’d like to hear your experience — check to see if your policies are there as of the time of this posting. If not, try re-posting them. Let us know if they dissapear any time after that. :]

original article written May 18 by JB
The long-awaited Shop Policies page appears to have a bug, where the text a seller has entered in that section will vanish some time after it was saved.

This forum thread is where users are reporting the problem.

Etsy Admin has responded in the thread yesterday:

RevolvingDork says:
We haven’t been able to reproduce any occurance of “dissapearing” policies, and we haven’t seen anything in the logs that points to this happening.

Be sure to click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the Shop Policies page after you’re done entering them — if you don’t, your policies will not be saved. Also, look for the message “Your shop policies have been successfully updated.” — if you see that, we’ve received your data and it shouldn’t be going anywhere. :]
Posted at 12:14 pm, May 17 2008 EST

Despite the assumption that this is user error, many users have stated that they have clicked the “Save Changes” button. In many cases the policies are saved for a period of time and then they vanish later. Some users have re-added them multiple times, and they keep vanishing.
If you have experienced this bug please add your details to this forum thread.
If you have not experienced the bug (yet), I recommend saving the text to a Word or notepad file.

——————————————————
Editorial:
My own experience:
I added my shop policies on the day the shop policies page was released, May 15. I know they were saved correctly because other people viewed them and commented how quickly I had added them.
I checked them every day since then and they were always there. I have never edited them since adding them on May 15. They were still there yesterday May 17.
They are gone now. They seem to have vanished overnight while I was not even logged in.
my policies page today:

my policies page yesterday:

They were saved for 3 days and then vanished overnight.
Without me editing them or touching them.

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UPDATE by Deja Vu (May 19, 2008):

Etsy Admin is asking for input in order to understand the issue better. If you have experienced this, please refer to this thread to provide information.

* * * * *

UPDATE by GreenMamba - 05/22/08

Prompted by a community outcry for better notification, a new Storque article has just been published - Tech Updates: Shop Policy Glitch

Update by JB, 5/23/08
RevolvingDork started a new thread to collect data for this bug. The previous thread is locked.

RevolvingDork says:
Hi everyone,

We’ve had reports of some sellers sporadically having their policy pages “cleared out” some time after they’ve updated their policies.

Finding the cause of this issue has been our number one priority, but we have so far been unable to reproduce the issue as described and it has therefore been very difficult to track it down.

We have just made some more changes that may solve the issue, but because we can’t reproduce it we can’t yet tell.

To help us out, please try populating your policy fields now, and let us know if they get cleared again after that.

If you do find that they’ve disappeared, please post the last actions you took before you noticed them being gone. It’s being triggered by a combination of events, so knowing what you’ve done directly before the policies are removed will be extremely helpful.

Thank you for your cooperation – we know you all put a lot of thought into your policies, and we want to make sure they stay there!