An unposted question or answer is saved as a draft every forty-five seconds. In theory. The draft saving feature is unreliable when a post is written over an extended period of time.
When I work on a post for an extended period of time it stops saving drafts. When that happens it is impossible to get it to save again, no matter what I do. I have tried
- Typing some more
- Waiting some more
- Trying to navigate away from the page but clicking ‘cancel’ on the popup
- Actually navigating away from the page
- Begging it to save
- Standing on my head
- Pulling faces (No, I didn't resort to this really)
Unfortunately I can't tell you exactly when it stops saving, but I can give you a real example of what I did when this occurred:
I started writing this question and continued typing for a few minutes; it saved drafts just as it was supposed to. I left it to stand for a while (perhaps ten minutes) after it had already saved a draft. I came back and started typing constantly again, watching to see it if it would stop saving. It saved about three times, then failed altogether.
This is especially annoying to me because I always work on a new post for a long time, meaning that I have this problem 100% of the time. To make it worse, the mains electricity at my home often trips the earth leakage (it’s the incoming power -- nothing I can do about it). The result is that I have often lost large portions of posts I am working on. I know I can write posts in a text editor, but I would rather write it in the question or answer box for three reasons:
- When working with a few images it if often important to be able to see the post as it will look
- I can see what it looks like while writing
- I like to keep an eye on new questions and the review queue at the same time
This behaviour is repeatable for me. I guess it’s a bug, but I’m not sure if there is a timeout for draft saving, or a limited amount times a post can be saved. Whatever it is, it’s a long-standing issue, and one which causes me much annoyance. I would be very grateful if it were fixed.
I can reproduce this, but do you have this same issue? If you have the time, could you verify this behaviour?
