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Autosave, a la Gmail


Guest Irish Cowboy

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Posted

so, those of us who use gmail (and everybody should, its a great setup they got), if you're writing for over so many minutes, your text is autosaved to a "drafts" folder.
after so many complaints about peole writing lenghty posts at my forum & losing them to crashes, power outage, internet troubles, accidentally hit whatever key, etc, i cant help but think this'd be a really useful feature for a message board. Im uncertain exactly how it'd work, but i imagine its possible...any plans/chances for such a feature?

ps, to those who know more about what to expect from IPB 2.2:
1) ive read of a unviersal mod installer - is this exactly what it sounds like? with my faecesty grasp of php & coding in general, that could be really handy, tho ive no idea how itd work either.
2) so, uh....this new layout really means all my skins/look are gone again? :( Everytime i upgrade, it takes forever to get enough skins to really give the place a feel, look sharp, and by then, i gotta hold off to upgrade till at least a few decent skins are going.....@#$%
3) Some skins i use (especially the board's main one) leave the menus up top jumbled when viewed in firefox. i figure this is mostly the coding of the individual skin's fault, but has anyone seen/heard much about this being improved for 2.2?

thanks in advance for any help offered here.

Posted

Right? I keep thinking it'd just be an amazing feature, but i dont know if its possible, much less this late in 2.2's release...mebbe for a future one?
Is there any better place to have this where those who have a hand in its development might see it or comment? I'm certain its nothing they havent thought of themselves, just curious.

Posted

Right? I keep thinking it'd just be an amazing feature, but i dont know if its possible, much less this late in 2.2's release...mebbe for a future one?


Is there any better place to have this where those who have a hand in its development might see it or comment? I'm certain its nothing they havent thought of themselves, just curious.



Just do a quick javascript save to cookies? :P
Posted

would that work? i was thinking an undo button that works would do it, but through gmail's autosave, ive never lost a thing, regardless of what's happened, so such a system'd be best, i think, assuming its possible.

would making a poll for this get the idea more attention?

Posted

I asked for this very same thing with the 2.1 release and Invision clearly didn't "get it" then and I doubt they will now or any release in the near future. I agree that many users spend a lot of time on a post only to have an error occur when they post it or beforehand on their end.

I certainly hope Invision does incorporate this in the future but for the 2.2 release I'd say this is much too late in the game for it to be added.

Posted

You could probably use ajax to write the contents of the post screen to a database field, it could periodically save that value as you type. One thing that wouldn't work for, though, is say you are writing a big long post and something on the website (like the database, or the server) goes down. At that point, you're no longer able to do the auto-saving. Wonder if it would be possible to pop up a javascript alert in those cases...

Sounds pretty interesting.

Posted

Great suggestion. I also absolutely despise when I'm writing a lengthy posts and then circumstance kills power.

+1

Posted

You could probably use ajax to write the contents of the post screen to a database field, it could periodically save that value as you type. One thing that wouldn't work for, though, is say you are writing a big long post and something on the website (like the database, or the server) goes down. At that point, you're no longer able to do the auto-saving. Wonder if it would be possible to pop up a javascript alert in those cases...



Sounds pretty interesting.


Why use Ajax? Use Javascript to send post commands to the server if you want to store them there, or I would think store the posts in cookies.
Posted

Why use Ajax? Use Javascript to send post commands to the server if you want to store them there, or I would think store the posts in cookies.


Using javascript to send post commands to the server is ajax.
Posted

You could probably use ajax to write the contents of the post screen to a database field, it could periodically save that value as you type. One thing that wouldn't work for, though, is say you are writing a big long post and something on the website (like the database, or the server) goes down. At that point, you're no longer able to do the auto-saving. Wonder if it would be possible to pop up a javascript alert in those cases...



Sounds pretty interesting.



howdy Fu.
yeah, you got the idea...so is it a likely or even requested-before feature? do you often get members of the administration/development team in here commenting on suggestions & possibilities?
Posted

As mentioned above, you'd have to use XML processing ;)


Not necessarily, ajax doesn't have to consist of XML, features like updating your birthday in the new 2.2 profile use ajax and they don't use XML, this would work almost exactly the same way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

XML is sometimes used as the format for transferring data between the server and client, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML. These files may be created dynamically by some form of server-side scripting.


Is that enough bickering about semantics for you? :rolleyes:

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