Proposition: Saving posts
Hello Lucio and Ali,
It would be great to save posts for later editing. For the moment, when I start to write a post and have to interrupt myself, I copy-paste it to a Word document for later completion. However, it does not keep the format from the forum (quotes specifically), so then I have to copy-paste individually the text without the quotes, so I do the work twice. Or if I start a post then I write it in 1 go and then it happens that I have some other ideas/corrections later on and the edit time has already passed.
I think saving the post would allow people to start to write, think about it and later edit it more.
I don't know if this idea has already been proposed, if you think it adds value or if it is technically possible though.
What do you guys think about it?
Cheers!
Edit: I just lost the post I was writing (wrong manipulation, page changed) so I have another proposition: automatic saving of draft every 5 minutes for instance.
I see now that by copy-pasting the draft in Gmail, it preserves the formatting from the forum.
So that's a very workable alternative.
Both great ideas, John, thank you for sharing them.
And I agree with you: both the ability to manually save posts and to automatically doing so would be very helpful.
Problem is: it would require either a bigger software for the forum, adding some other plugins, or adding custom code.
All of which would take time to research, and make the website more complex.
And more complex means more likely to break.
So far I've preferred to keep things as simple as possible, and it shows: there wasn't any need for a developer in like 2 months.
I like your solution of using word -and then improved with Gmail-.
I try to finish when I write and if it's getting long, then I do the same.
Plus, I always copy paste all before hitting "submit", just in case I got logged out in-between.
Here's what I sometimes do:
- Copy/paste the post's content into Google Docs.
- Highlight everything (I click "Ctrl + A").
- Change the font to "Verdana", the font size for standard text to 16 pt., and the font size for any headers to 26.5 pt.
- When you're ready to publish, copy/paste the text back into a forum post.
When you click "submit", the format will be the same as any regular forum post.
But, if you find that the Gmail option works best for you, John, that may be better (I only use this option above for when I'm writing long reviews).