Loosing text pre-post :( stupid back button

Phizinza · January 2008

I've had this happen a few times. I spend 5 to 10mins writing a post to just loose it all by accidentally hitting the back button. I've notice some other forums manage to keep that data so you can just hit forwards and its all back there. Is there a way to get Vanilla doing this? Its really getting annoying. Thanks.

SlashedZero · January 2008

You should find this quite useful.

Phizinza · January 2008

That is good, thank you. But I have no idea how to modify it so it does what I want. I need it to show that message when I hit the back button in the browser (or more importantly when I hit the button on the mouse.)

Wanderer · January 2008

Safari prompts you to cancel if you try to close a page with a form text field active.

Also, hitting the back button after leaving a page with text in a form field gets you right back where you were, your text included.

Just what you want and right out of the box.

Somebody once said: "Use the right tools if you want quality results!"

WallPhone · January 2008

The back-forwards behavior you're describing would work if Vanilla didn't invalidate the browser cache on every page load. It might be easier to find a js that checks for data and pops up a confirmation or even saves/restores the post to a temporary cookie.

Phizinza · February 2008

Right.. So tell me how exactly I am suppose to get 100+ members to get a different web browser? Yes WallPhone, that would pretty much do what I want. But I really don't know what to look for or how to get it to work in Vanilla.

Wanderer · February 2008

Quote: Phizinza
Right.. So tell me how exactly I am suppose to get 100+ members to get a different web browser?

Slowly, firmly and pointing out the benefits of the alternative.

I now work in a 100% Windows-only, I.E. only environment and after 3 months Safari has 20% penetration, probably more but some of them hide it when they see me coming because they are too "proud" to admit they like Safari!

And as a spin-off, there's now also Firefox awareness!

It's education and information mate, the facts and the expreience will do the rest.

Posted: Sunday, 3 February 2008 at 9:18AM

Phizinza · February 2008

Obviously you don't know what car people are like... Far from willing to change anything on their computer most of them.

Wanderer · February 2008

Well then let them whinge and suffer with the choices they make, a natural consequence in both computing and life in general!

Posted: Friday, 8 February 2008 at 6:17AM

sirlancelot · February 2008

Haha, let's not make this a browser war

Safari's still the new kid on the block and won't be widely adopted until it gets better DOM management and the linux platform may never even see it (my two-cents).

Anyway, this problem is a result of a work-around used to make sure that each user gets a completely up-to-date page whenever they visit. The problem code causing this is appg/headers.php @ line 14-17. This is the problem and adding a browser feature is nice but a real solution involves fixing the code.

Here's my proposal, since that file is called AFTER $Configuration['SELF_URL'] is defined appropriately, make the headers.php file test for this:

if ($Configuration['SELF_URL'] == 'post.php') {
// PREVENT PAGE CACHING on all pages but the comments page
header ('Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT'); // Date in the past
header ('Last-Modified: ' . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT'); // always modified
header ('Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate'); // HTTP/1.1
header ('Pragma: no-cache'); // HTTP/1.0
}

This of course is untested and may have other implications, but I bet it will solve the problem. Anyone else care to chime in?

WallPhone · February 2008

That would work for new discussions, but new comments on a discussion will still clear out.

For those cases, might need to set the expires to an average of the time between comments to a discussion, and last modified to the time of the last comment. Gonna have to read up on the http spec of cache-control and pragma directives.

sirlancelot · February 2008

That would work for new discussions, but new comments on a discussion will still clear out.

Oops! That's the last time I post untested code

Clearly, this requires more research. On a somewhat related note, it would be nice to see a feature where Vanilla would notify a user before posting their comment if there are any new comments that might not've been read.

SlashedZero · February 2008

it would be nice to see a feature where Vanilla would notify a user before posting their comment if there are any new comments that might not've been read.
I'd love to see such a feature. Pretty useful when people start chatting like if they were on a messenger.

Loosing text pre-post :( stupid back button

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