Auto-Drafts VS. Usability

mtschirs

After playing around with Vanilla for some time, I am really annoyed by the draft auto-saves.

If I write a comment and accidentally navigate back or to another site and then come back to the comment form, modern browsers would automatically fill in my latest unfinished comment.

With Vanilla auto-saved drafts however, the form is filled with an older version of what I wrote (from the time of the last auto-save). The browser doesn't automatically fill in my latest version of my unfinished comment since the form already has a value .

How to combine these two mechanisms without overriding this very useful client-side 'auto-saving'?

R_J

I don't know if that plugin works with the current version of Vanilla, but I guess HTML5s local storage is one answer: http://vanillaforums.org/addon/localdrafts-plugin

You will loose drafts when changing the client, but to my opinion the advantages are worth it.

mtschirs

Didn't know about that plugin yet! Thanks.

However, shouldn't this be adressed in Vanilla itself? The auto-draft feature might have made sense some years ago, but with modern browsers it could really need an update.

Linc

There's a plugin specifically for disabling that feature, almost as old as the product: http://vanillaforums.org/addon/stopautodraft-plugin

I do not trust any browser to remember my comment, frankly. Still a fan of auto-save.

mtschirs

I don't want to ditch auto-drafts, just don't want them to ruin the even better auto-save mechanism provided by modern browsers. Surely, we can combine the best of both worlds?

Linc

@mtschirs said:
Surely, we can combine the best of both worlds?

By making drafts device-dependent?

mtschirs

@Linc schrieb:
By making drafts device-dependent?

What would that solve? A solution might be to ask the client directly whether or not he has a recent auto-save of the form value. This is IMHO only possible via javascript. Only if the client browser does not have an auto-save available, we request the last available draft from the server and only then set the form input value.

See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Securing_your_site/Turning_off_form_autocompletion (we don't want to turn it off though, only detect if it is available)

Linc

@mtschirs said:
What would that solve?

I wasn't making a proposal, I was trying to understand what was already being proposed.

mtschirs

Just fixed this via https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/pull/2948

The issue was not the auto-draft feature (as I thought), but a misguided "Cache-Control: no-store" header. See the linked pull request.