Several of our users have reported issues with drafts being overwritten when going from device to device, as well as wanting to be able to draft several posts at once in separate tabs.
Is there any way to disable drafts autosaving, bonus points if it’s on a per-account basis so our entire forum isn’t roped into not having autosaving? We think the ability to draft multiple posts in multiple locations is worth more to a lot of our users than not losing progress if you accidentally close the tab.
No, this is not possible.
If you have a repro of drafts being lost, post that. Be specific, include the exact sequence of steps required.
I think it generally occurs when people attempt to make two different posts across devices
So I don’t think it’s a bug so much as just a “helpful” feature that can actually be less than helpful
Can you be more specific? Do you mean two different replies to the same topic? Or do you mean two new topics? You’ll need to describe the exact sequence, step by step.
Because when you open a topic on a different device, it will automatically trigger the editor and your saved reply draft for that topic…
which is exactly the issue when people are trying to make multiple replies at once
Why would they need to make multiple, simultaneous replies to the same topic? Can you provide a real world example of why this would be necessary, what the specifics of the situation and topic are?
I mean clearly I’m asking because we have a real-world case of this being an issue - in particular we have users that want to both be able to provide moment-to-moment input on a discussion while also composing a longer and more thoughtful response to what’s going on in the grand scheme of things.
Ie, we have discussions on a large number of topics that are fast enough to warrant quicker responses but not fast enough to make them appropriate for our site’s Discord server, but on top of which people also want to be able to spend time drafting larger and better formatted discussion points without needing to use some kind of external markdown editor every time. This also results in users trying to keep a larger post on a desktop while typing smaller posts on their mobile phone.
And it seems that an ability to disable the site forcibly overriding one of these posts with the other if the users are not extremely careful would be a very welcome addition, especially if it could be done at a per-user level.
I can’t imagine this scenario is really that rare on any discussion-based forum of a moderate activity level, given I myself have often worked on a few posts at once between tabs on older PhpBB sites and the like, and sometimes that has resulted in two of those tabs being responses to the same thread. Don’t see much reason to believe that would be significantly less likely just because it’s a Discourse topic.
I suggest sending a PM to yourself if you need multiple simultaneous replies to the same topic.
We do plan to add multiple simultaneous new topic drafts (right now only one new topic draft is allowed at any given time), but multiple simultaneous reply drafts to the same topic is not on any of our roadmaps for the foreseeable future.
As an aside, it also sounds like you might need a chatroom (a rapidly moving short term chat alongside the longer term memory of the topic), which is something we’re currently building in Discourse.
That would in and of itself be a big improvement!
That being said, even just the ability to turn off drafts entirely somehow would be awesome.
uh
no
lol
definitely not helpful when things are relevant to a given topic and also not actually going at chatroom speed, just “faster than is convenient to write an essay about” speed
plus it’s much harder for other, future users to join in the conversation if it’s a chatroom than a forum - if we wanted to only be a chatroom we’d just use the discord server we already have and stop paying to host Discourse lol
I’ve seen shoutboxes and the like on forums and even if your chatroom is basically just Discord or Slack but in Discourse it’s still probably not going to actually do anything for our exact use case here
Could be exciting for other uses though, or for new sites that don’t want to also set up a Discord!
I dunno, up to @sam if we want a site setting to disable drafts, you’re kind of swimming upstream here though. 
No stranger to that - you guys definitely seem to have a certain vision for how things “should be” and while that’s great when it aligns with a certain user’s use case, it does definitely mean there’s resistance when it doesn’t 
If we wanted it that badly I’m sure we could simply pay somebody to do it, but if it ends up being a core feature at some point that’s cool - if not, the intent was mostly to see if it was possible in the first place and if the answer is “no” then although that’s a shame in the moment it’s also fine lol
This is the first time I have heard the request for a global off switch. I am in the wait-and-see camp, lets see how popular this request gets.
The good news is that a theme component could provide this feature. Does not need to be shipped with core. The bad news is that it is rather tricky to build and would involve a few overrides.
Are theme components generally user-toggleable?
If so that would be basically ideal.
Yes technically, but you get no server side storage, only per-browser long term storage.
that’s basically perfect