# The awkward mishap of premature posting

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-awkward-mishap-of-premature-posting/395908
**Category:** UX
**Created:** [12 februari 2026 om 12:35 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-awkward-mishap-of-premature-posting/395908 "2026-02-12T12:35:05Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1

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### Author: ![Canapin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/canapin/32/119591_2.png) [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [12 februari 2026 om 12:35 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-awkward-mishap-of-premature-posting/395908/1 "2026-02-12T12:35:05Z")

</div>

I’m apparently affected by the “premature posting” ailment in various communication, non-chat-focused apps.

Primarily emails (Gmail) and Discourse.

What happens is that I write my message, and I accidentally send it. This inconvenience happens too often for my taste, and it’s probably because of a keyboard shortcut, like Ctrl + Enter, or (perhaps more commonly?) Tab ↹ then Enter.

I can manage it on Gmail: there’s a short window where you can cancel the email sending. Yay! 🙌  
To completely avoid sending my post while I’m writing, I don’t fill in the recipient input. I do that last, just before sending the email.

But on Discourse, for non-PMs, it’s not possible. I tried removing the default category from the Category selector, so I would likely face a “category can’t be blank” message when sending my post, but alas, I can’t.

It’s embarrassing to prematurely submit a topic or a reply. I can delete it right away, but the content remains visible to others (they just have to click the edit icon) because this is Discourse’s default behavior. And I can’t complete the content while it’s deleted, to revert the deletion afterward.

In the end, either I keep my post incomplete (usually in the middle of a sentence or a word 🥴) and patiently edit it, which I don’t like because I’m also slow to write, or I delete it and write a new topic/post instead.

Since it often happens on long messages, or those I have to put a lot of thought into, I’d be happy to have a toggleable lock 🔏 icon that completely prevents message sending.

I’m not particularly suggesting a Discourse feature for this… Unless it happens to many users 😄

It’s more about sharing this experience, the subsequent embarrassment of premature sending in Discourse, getting other members’ opinions, and sharing ideas to prevent it.

As for me, even a userscript would do the job. ~~Unfortunately, I don’t know how to prevent Discourse’s keyboard shortcut from sending a post, and neither does the AI.~~  
Edit: see [The awkward mishap of premature posting - #10 by Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-awkward-mishap-of-premature-posting/395908/10)

## Are you affected by premature posting?

_Poll ([view on site](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-awkward-mishap-of-premature-posting/395908/1))_

## Would you like to be able to “lock” a composer in Discourse?

_Poll ([view on site](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-awkward-mishap-of-premature-posting/395908/1))_

Eager to hear your thoughts!

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-awkward-mishap-of-premature-posting/395908)._