For years the fact that Discourse didn’t offer to “save draft for later” meant that it wouldn’t be saved. For example because you hadn’t entered enough characters.
Now I never know if I am loosing my draft or not. I can no longer use the button next to “create topic” that confirms that the draft can be saved. I can only choose “discard” which means I will delete it, or “cancel” which just takes me back to the composer. Or I can try clicking the “x” way over on the other side of the screen and hope that the toast message will say “Draft saved.” Maybe it won’t, because my draft wasn’t long enough - but by then it’s too late, it’s already gone.
Is there a way to check whether my draft was saved before risking to loose it that I might have missed? Checking the list of my current drafts before closing the composer works, but it’s a pretty annoying workaround.
I also preferred having the button on the left, because that’s where my focus is while writing. It’s where I see the composer window and where I interact with the toolbar. Sometimes I glance at the preview on the right, but most of the time I’m focused on the left. That’s where all my interaction happens. That’s another reason why I usually preferred to use that button even though it meant an extra click.
Thanks for telling me. I cannot see texts that appear on hover on my tablet, that’s why I didn’t know about it, but that’s also why it doesn’t really help me.
But I am curious: What does the button say when you click “new topic” and enter only a few characters into the composer? Discourse doesn’t save drafts with less than the minimum required characters, so I wonder what the text on hover says in this case. Does it still say “save and close” then, and does it really save your draft in that case? Or does it simply say “close” without “save”?
I know this sounds like I would also lose only a few characters in that case, but actually you can quote quite a few posts and enter only a few characters and decide to continue later. Since Discourse doesn’t count characters in quotes, I sometimes stay below 20 characters before I decide to continue later. That’s how I lost quite a few drafts, and finding all those quotes again is not that fun. That’s why I prefer to ensure my draft actually gets saved.
I’m not sure the save button would have helped in this particular case.
But losing drafts for whatever reason is never fun. And the fact that Discourse doesn’t save drafts until you’ve entered 20 characters means that when I start quoting other posts, I can easily lose everything - because quotes don’t count toward that limit. So I can add one or even several quotes I want to refer to, and as soon as I close the composer, everything is gone. There’s no warning that, even though there may be hundreds of characters visible in my composer, nothing will actually be saved. That’s where this button was helpful: it indicated that Discourse considered my post long enough to start saving it.
I often close the composer for various reasons - for example, when someone replies to me in another topic and I want to answer there first, or when I want to test something before continuing, or simply because I prefer to continue on my laptop instead of the tablet. In all these cases, the quotes I’ve already added are lost when I come back, and I have to search for those posts again. That’s exactly what I’d like to avoid. That’s why it has always been important to me to make sure that my draft is being saved.
Of course, that doesn’t protect against bugs, but at least it protects against the normal behavior that has caused me to lose drafts before.
Edit: I tested on a forum which is on a version before the discard button was changed. The missing “saved draft” option would have indicated that something was wrong with the draft. When I started my draft and closed it using the discard button, “saved draft for later” was shown:
We made an update to ensure we’re always saving drafts when there is any content in the title or composer text area fields, so you shouldn’t run into this issue again. Whenever you close the composer with content in these areas, a draft will be saved (unless you close the composer via the Discard button).
So, if you had closed the composer after adding the two quotes to my post, they would have still been there once you reopened it?
I think I would still prefer an option to close on the left where my focus is while writing, and I’d also still like to check that a draft I care about is really saved and there is no bug preventing that. Spending an hour on a draft and losing it taught me the hard way not to trust auto-saving.
I think there may be some edge cases… I notice if I start a new topic draft and close it, that gets saved. If I open another new topic draft (I have no other windows open), I get a draft conflict warning, and then if I save that draft… the original is replaced?
