[Suggestion] Post lock?

[Quillhart]

Greetings!

Alright, so my idea is about the general post-making in Canterlot. I'm certain that many of us have experienced the frustration of typing a wall of text and then accidentally happen to close the tab or just click a link on the site which results with that the effort you laid on typing said text was all in wain and you'll have to redo everything. Ugh

My question, and somewhat suggestion, however, is if it would be possible to add a 'post lock'? I call in post lock since I don't know what else to call it. It's basically what most writing softwares use in order to make sure you don't lose you work by asking you if you really want to close the program. The idea is if we maybe could add something that asks you if you really want to close/change the site when you have something written inside your post. Perhaps something like: "You have written inside your post. Are you sure you want to leave the site and perhaps lose your work? -Yes- -No-"

I know that the issue can be avoided by typing your text in another document before pasting it over to Canterlot but I'm a lazy blonk and I know others who are too. Would this be a possibility or am I just cackling about stuff I don't know anything about? Thank you for making a great site and have a nice day!

~ Love, Quillhart

[Corsair]

Canterlot already keeps a copy of partially written posts. I've used it many times to recover RP posts I've typed when I clicked a link by accident or something. When you type into the text box, you'll see a little dialog at the bottom that says "Last auto saved:" and a time. You can often use that link to recover lost posts.

[Quillhart]

Oh, well that could surely have saved me from a whole lot of headache >_<

[Halide]

The best thing you can ever do for preserving your posts is to write them up in a simple program like notepad or writer or word, then just copy-paste over what you've written. However, due to the blackboxed nature of IPBs posting system, this would actually be rather tricky to implement, simply due to the fact that the software itself wasn't made to be very easily modified.

Though your idea is good, I'm afraid the implementation would be a -lot- of work on the backend.

[Quillhart]

The best thing you can ever do for preserving your posts is to write them up in a simple program like notepad or writer or word, then just copy-paste over what you've written. However, due to the blackboxed nature of IPBs posting system, this would actually be rather tricky to implement, simply due to the fact that the software itself wasn't made to be very easily modified.

Though your idea is good, I'm afraid the implementation would be a -lot- of work on the backend.

...International Peace Bureau?

And well, I understand, thank you for explaining the issue. I thought it felt a bit strange that nothing like this has been made before when it's such an obvious problem but that clarifies quite a lot. Thanks!

[Halide]

It is sort of already implemented, insomuch as there's autosaving on posts in the ip.board software (the code that the admins here pay for to just have the forum built and easily accessed and looking actually pretty darn good without having to spend hundreds of hours doing all the work involved). However, that code is outside of the scope of easy access for an ipboard admin, and implementing it would actually be rather nasty, just because it'd involve non-user-triggered scripting trying to store and cycle temporary data.

But, to reiterate, the workaround of simply using an 'offline' program to type up a post before putting it up can help a lot; this is also great for 'paragraph style' chat RPs. As such, this isn't something that's liable to be fixed given the massively unfavorable effort/reward ratio.

[Quillhart]

I'm taking classes in coding so I understand where the problem is. Thanks for clarifying

[Rosewind]

I second Halide's suggestion. As with anything, save often and save backups elsewhere.