The awkward mishap of premature posting

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! :raising_hands:
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 :woozy_face:) 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 :locked_with_pen: icon that completely prevents message sending.

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

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.

Are you affected by premature posting?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

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

  • Yes (built-in)
  • Yes (third-party)
  • No—I like to live on the edge
0 voters

Eager to hear your thoughts!

3 Me gusta

Me too — when using touch screen. Very annoying.

2 Me gusta

This is super relatable. Happens to me in Chat[1] as well. Sometimes I wish for a confirmation popup or a 10 second window to permanently delete.


  1. That is, chat in Discourse ↩︎

2 Me gusta