This bug is pretty bad — as far as I can tell, if you have a pending post, you can’t post really at all:
- You can’t post again in that same approval-required category
- You can’t create a new topic in another category
- You can’t reply in another category
The good news is that you don’t actually lose the post if you click Discard when prompted — it is still accessible in the admin’s review queue and appears as expected when approved — but it’s obviously a super confusing user experience, and this pop-up appears after:
I think we should loop in an engineer to take it from here for the bug fix, and then I can pick back up with looking at the overall process that @sam wanted to look into.
However, I do have a few notes there so far:
Yes, there’s a pop-up notification after submitting the post:
No, there’s no indication of how long it might take to be reviewed.
Yes, you get a notification when the post is approved:
Right now, you can’t — because of the bug 
Right now, they are listed in your drafts.
However, if you try to open the draft, you get the same “Do you want to discard your post?” message. I wonder if it’s expected that these would show in drafts?
I’m not sure if this is a composer problem or not at this point.