Auto-draft when you preview

[antonmo]

So, after having a long post prepared with lots of times pushing preview, I still managed to lose it all, and there are no saved drafts.

On the other hand, pushing save draft takes to another screen for confirmation and then away from the message on the next click

I think both of these behaviors are quite user unfriendly. However, if it would auto save draft when you push preview, it could’ve saved me some headache and double work

[gmads]

You could try enabling the "Remember me" option at the login page.

remember_me.jpg (80.97 KiB) Viewed 327 times

I ignore how long will the session be alive: that depends on the value that the administrator set for the "session length" parameter.

Be aware that you also need to have your browser configured to allow cookies.

---

This has also happened to me, more times than I'd like to remember.

What works for me, though I still might lose the last editing —and assuming that I have used at least once the Preview button— is to press twice the browser's Go back button, select and copy the whole text (just a safeguard), press Preview (the browser will complain about something, I don't recall the message, but it has to do with it detecting that it is under a different session id), and then press Preview once more.

[Basler Biker]

Like mentioned by gmads, at every preview on a PC do a CTRL-A CTRL-C
If anything happens, you go back to paste CTRL-V it again.

Contents can be lost, in the middle of your work, in various situations.
Being aware of this can help you preventing loss.

• if an edit is open too long, its internal "number" (a serial key for the data in the database) may be obsolete (= taken by another post being edited and saved before you did) You will be asked to SAVE or PREVIEW once more.
• you do a browser backspace (previous page) but have no "forward" function key (or mouse key) (like on a phone)
  if you have a "forward" then your text will still be there - it's in the page-cache of your computer.
• your internet connection is lost while you were working, when you PREVIEW or SAVE you get directed to the login screen. All is lost unless you have it all in the clipboard.

So a simple thing is to be more clever that the system, and keep long texts, also in the middle of your typing/editing, every now and then copied into the clipboard.

BB

[Emi]

If I think my post might be too big or complicated, including tables for example, I use a MarkDown editor. My favorite is Retext but there are a few more, free and commercial.
It has autosave and preview. The only issue is that BBCode is not shown in the preview.

Edited: typo

[lrai]

I am not sure if this will help but when I know I am going to write a long "something" I will do it in a word doc, then I can save as I go and finally cut and paste it into wherever I need. Just something I have learned to do.

[antonmo]

Thank you everyone. I hardly ever sit in front of a computer for my language learning anymore. To create the posts I often am copy- and pasting between different apps. Getting picture urls, looking up words etc, so I can’t copy the whole text at the same time. But you are right, I could do it in a different app that doesn’t have an internet session duration time limit