When you have a new topic draft in progress, it opens automatically when you go to the main topic list page. I’ve been annoyed about this in the past, but recently, it’s been getting in my way more and more. I realize the current design is intended to allow me to browse within a single tab while writing a topic, but I still often find it helpful to have multiple tabs open, personally.
For example, I always run into this issue is when I am writing up a weekly newsletter because it’s helpful to have multiple tabs open for the different topics I quote or reference while I’m writing the topic.
Here’s a few illustrations of the issues I face:
Figure 1
Minimize new topic composer
Go to another topic
Go back to the topic list page
New topic un-minimizes… and for some reason asks me whether I want to abandon my post
Continuing from figure 2… OK, no big deal that the composer opens in my face, I guess, cuz I can just minimize it right? Then I can just continue browsing the site like I want to.
Well, now I’m back in the same situation as figure 1:
Maybe, we should certainly revisit draft access from user profile at some point but I don’t know if we have the resources to deal with it right now… as it is a heavy power user behavior (topic only drafts, multiple tabs) and thus rare.
Maybe we should use that opportunity to make it more obvious how to get to your draft: Leave the button gray when there is no draft, but make it a blue, primary button when it’s in the Open Draft state?
Hi, I hope this idea is useful to solve the complicated behaviour the composer has.
I think the composer should have tabs.
This way the composer could have the same state across all the (browser) tabs (solving the problem of Figure 4) and you could see all your drafts in one place and switch between them. This would simplify things a lot for the people that open many tabs in the browser or have many drafts.
Also, nothing would have to popup because you already would see all your drafts. (solving the problems of Figures 1,2 and 3)
(English is not my first language, excuse me if something is not well written.)
Following it, we no longer pop open the topic draft, instead we show:
This means you can happily author a reply to a post while your topic draft is going. I find this flow significantly better, there are 2 minor edge cases that exist
If you go to full page search it is not “draft aware” so it has a “New Topic” button, if you click that and start authoring you will nuke your topic draft (I feel this is pretty rare so am going to hold off on correcting it)
if you close the composer and discard the draft we correctly switch to “+ New Topic” however if you are on the tags list page and then head back to /categories or /latest without refreshing the browser an annoying + Open Draft can show up. This is cause I did not figure out a clean way of poisoning the store. Anyway it is quite minor.
One thing I’ve wanted a few times is “yeah, I know I was writing a draft earlier, but I want to write something more important right now instead”. So completely dropping the draft on the server might not be what’s desired here.
I think you are talking about a different use case here.
If you want to author 2 different topics and jump between topic drafts… this is going to be tricky and the best workaround for now is to send a PM to yourself.
If you want to work on replying while you have a topic draft in place, well, it works really nicely now. Once you minimize the composer and head to a topic page you can reply at will. When you return to the topic list you will see + Open Draft. The case I am talking about is not when you minimize composer, its when you click cancel which is explicitly saying “hey I give up the topic I wrote was garbage”.
