So I decided to make a raising and lowering platform style elevator in one of my levels, after some searching and no reliable results online, I went to an official map and tried to reverse engineer one from in the game. A great deal of time later, I have a SEMI working elevator, but now I've run into an interesting problem that I haven't seen before and can't find an answer for so I thought I'd pose it to you guys.

When any object (player or cube) comes in contact with any of the pieces of my elevator, they suddenly collapse, falling down into their fully open position, I can then press my button to operate the pieces, and on the raise command the pieces will all rise back to their appropriate location, but again, any contact with them will cause them all to fall again. I've done some searching in the official map and can't find any settings or brushes that would prevent this and I can't find any similar problems online, so I'm hoping one of you guys know something that I don't and can help me out.

First of all: What entity are you using for the lift?
Secondly which map did you decompile it from? It could be that you decompiled a lift which is meant to fall when you are on it.

I reverse engineered the ones in "sp_a4_laser_catapult", and I played through the level a couple of times while I was trying to wrap my mind around the logic branches and such that they were using, and they're not meant to collapse in the level.

The models I'm using are:
"straight_piston_base.mdl"
"straight_piston_mid.mdl"
"straight_piston_end.mdl"
"straight_piston_tip.mdl"
"arm_interior_128_paneltop.mdl"

I was more asking for what kind of lift entity like a func_movelinear, func_door etc. This map they used func_doors.

Check your flags in the func_doors to see if "Toggle" is checked. This makes sure that the door does not automatically close again once it opens fully.
Also make sure that "Touch Opens" is unticked otherwise the lift will move if you touch the brushes.

Refer to this file: pistonlift.vmf

Success! It was the touch opens flag. I feel a little special for not having noticed that... >.>; My elevator is now running full steam, thanks a ton!