NinjaForge/Ninjaboard — Issue #28: Feature Idea: Saved Drafts
Author: stipsan
Created: 2011-12-29 16:40:10+00:00
State: open
Labels: pending audit

Reported by @betweenbrain:

> Hi All,

> I was just wondering if you think that it would be beneficial to have the ability to be able to save a draft when writing a post. The idea here is two-fold: 1) Save while writing so that you don't loose your draft if something happens like a session time out or crash (Windows!) 2) Save a draft a come back to it later to finish and post.

> What do you think?

> Matt

@ccondrup commented:

> phpBB 3 has this and I personally have never used/needed the functionality. On the contrary, I have only seen it mentioned when people have accidentally hit "save" instead of "submit" - of course that is clearly a UI issue in phpBB, but still..

> What I believe would make NB stand out is if it had automatic ajax draft saving of any post while editing, like GMail does. Saving every few seconds as you type, now that's ninja. It would help against crashes in case the browser does not keep the text (though they usually do nowadays), and you could also have a "my drafts" view to list all posts you never finished/submitted.

> Edit: Oh yeah, if that ajax call also checked for new replies, it would be pretty kick ass. A little status bar saying "Saving draft... saved! And wait, there are new replies in this topic you haven't read, click here to load them"

@stipsan commented:

> Yeah we've discussed this a lot on our ninja skype chats, and it seems we're all on the same page regarding this. GMail and > Apple Mail both solve the problem with Save + Submit confusion by saying "Save draft" instead of just Save. That is likely what we'll do, but still having ajax saving as you type, and I would also throw a html5 localStorage fallback on it in case you lose your internet connection, so that the post is still intact should that happen.

> We'll get to it as soon as we start ajaxifying our frontend as a progressive enhancement. We'll evaluate if there's time to do it for 1.2 once our refactor is complete.

@betweenbrain commented:

> Automatic ajax save, with html5 localStorage, would be a "stand out" feature for Ninjaborad for sure! In the past, I have had session issues on a site using Ninjaborad, and this would have helped me avoid receiving many complaints. I can see where this will become more and more helpful as messages and other forms of communication happen with Ninjaborad.

> An ajax new message notification, a la Gmail, would also be kick-ass.

> +1 regarding "Save draft"