Suggestion to help prevent losing a message or reply while composing

There appears to be an inconsistency in the way the forum handles a warning that a message being composed may be lost.

Consider composing a message which is not yet posted.
If I click something else on the site, such as the Forum, New Posts button, or even a previous message in that thread's index list, the software gives me a warning box with:
"This page is asking you to confirm that you want to leave - data you have entered may not be saved." with buttons 'Leave page' and 'Stay on page'

However, there are several operations that eliminate this warning making it easy to unintentionally lose the composed but unposted message.

The worst one (and most likely to happen) is to preview the message. A click on the 'Go Advanced' button disables the "leave page" warning from there on.
The same thing happens if you click the 'Preview Post' button while starting a new thread with the '+Post New Thread' button .

These actions, and at least one other way I found, can cause a user to lose all the (possibly carefully) composed text. By the time it is discovered, the back button may no longer recover the page. It would be helpful if the warning would be flagged for all circumstances.

If this can be added within the restraints of existing software, great. If not, then perhaps it could be sugggested for the future.

JKJ

John, I don't know of a solution but I have run into that situation several times. More often than not, I will write my post in a word processor and do a cut & paste into the forum text window. I use MS Word but there are several free processors available on-line.

If I compose a long message, I've learned through bitter experience to copy it to the clipboard before I do anything more - even hitting "save". You just never know when the system is going to eat your message.

Mike

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mike Henderson

If I compose a long message, I've learned through bitter experience to copy it to the clipboard before I do anything more - even hitting "save".

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Yes, I do that every time. Unless I forget.

JKJ

BTW, I used to have horrible trouble with losing my partially completed post. This happened seemingly at random, but especially if I moved the focus away from the SMC message composition to look up something on another web site. It got to where I not only copied the partially completed text to the clipboard, but I also temporarily saved it in Notepad just in case! I also had other annoying things happen when composing messages, like the cursor jumping above the first line when I used backspace.

All this went away when I changed the editor in the general settings from Enhanced Interface-Full WYSIWYG to Standard Editor

Since changing the editor, I have only lost a message when previewing and then forgetting to post. (Even copying the text to the clipboard doesn't help if I don't notice my mistake until later!)

JKJ

What I do on this and almost every other site on the web when I want to interrupt my current operation and do something else is to open the new page in a new browser tab. This way, I can do most anything, even on the same site, and when I'm done I can close the new tab (or leave it open) and go back to my original page with everything still intact. On most browsers you can open a page in a new tab by right clicking on the link or button and selecting "Open in a new tab" or some similar wording.

There might be a few things that you do on the new tab that can screw up the context of the original page but I have found those cases to be rare (rare enough that I can't recall what they are).

Hi Mark. When I was having SMC problems related to the editor, opening a new tab was exactly what i would do and it still messed up randomly. It may have had something to do with me using the Firefox browser, the Win 8 OS, or the phase of the moon, who knows. After changing to the simple editor I can freely move between things within SMC (profiles, gallery, search, etc) using a second tab and all works well. Well, except for the issue mentioned in the first message! At least that's something I can hope to control with diligence and discipline - after time researching, hunting down links, and composing, I really hate to lose a message by clicking, even accidentally, on something else on the screen!

I like the way gmail handles composing, saving often automatically to a draft. That protects me from myself.

JKJ

Quote:

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Originally Posted by John K Jordan

All this went away when I changed the editor in the general settings from Enhanced Interface-Full WYSIWYG to Standard Editor

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I did the same, John. It cleared up a number of small problems I was having.
Fred

Instead of using the left mouse button, click the wheel. That will open a new tab/window and keep the one with the message intact.