S J Birkill
MV Administrator
just a sensible reserve
Posts: 883
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New MV feature: Draft saving
« : 17.10.24 at 08:59 » |
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Have you ever been in the middle of posting a message to our Forum, a message with text enhancements including bold, italic, underlined, resized or coloured text, or any of those other less-used stylings (fancy fonts, centred, crossed through, bulleted, tabulated or justified text -- you get the idea), or you've felt it necessary to include 'code' or 'quote' panels in your post?
Probably not.
But it must be pretty common to find yourself sharing thoughts with other members in a post which might stretch to several paragraphs, with embedded set-lists, photos or links to other sites, email addresses or video files. Composing such messages can be time-consuming, and may involve frequent checks of (say) Web pages or e-mails to check sources and details. So the mounting sense of anxiety might be familiar: suppose your browser crashes, or the power goes out, or you inadvertently close the wrong tab. You come back here and your message is no longer anywhere to be found -- gone! Twenty minutes' work vanished without a trace.
You might have developed a routine involving a text editor and frequent cut and paste operations to ensure you have a backup in case something goes wrong. All rather tedious -- you can't usefully do a <Ctrl>-S either. The software behind MV's forum dates from the late 1990s, when automatic save-as-you-type routines were a new thing and very slow; adding such a feature at this stage would involve a complete rewrite of several of the program's modules. You might wish we would switch to a new, modern messaging system (an even bigger job if it were to retain all our features and history), and/or abandon the MV we love to Facebook or Google, again losing all of our twenty-year back story.
In an effort to relieve our collective anxiety I have added a new trick to MV: the facility to save a draft of one's post on demand and recall it whenever desired or necessary. Each operation is called by clicking a button below the text compose/edit box, either "Save Draft" or "Load Draft". Whenever the Save Draft button is clicked, the entire message, subject line and all, is saved to a local file on your computer. No, not a 'cookie' -- rather this employs the browser's 'Local Storage' feature, and the server knows nothing about it. So if you're needing to use the 'back' button or switch tabs to check a source for inclusion in your post, just hit Save Draft first, then off you confidently go.
When you return to complete your message, just go back to MV's 'New Post' (or 'Reply', or wherever you were). In the event that the message has disappeared (for this may be days or weeks later, in another city, after several restarts of your device), just click Load Draft and your message will instantly reappear in all its detail, ready for completion, editing or posting as if you'd never been away.
Just a couple of things to watch. To simplify operation I've chosen to make the 'Load' operation overwrite any existing text in the compose/edit box, rather than having you specify whether to replace (overwrite), insert (load at cursor) or append (load at end). Generally you'll want the first of these, as the original message will be absent. Your recovered message will, naturally enough, only be complete up to the point you last did a 'Save'. You should also avoid clicking Save Draft when the text box is empty, as this will overwrite your existing saved draft (there's only room for one) with an empty message. Note also that the Clear button can safely be used to delete the contents of the text box without hurting the saved draft.
As always, the Preview button will open a Preview panel above the edit box, so you can safely check how your message will look when posted. When it's complete and you're happy with it, click Post.
Comments welcome; any problems I'd very much like to know about, and fix. Complaints office next door.
Steve
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