The article editor naturally does a recovery autosave for unsaved changes every 30 seconds. I love this feature to save me from getting distracted/closing a tab accidentally, etc., but it has always meant that I've had to remember to go back into the article and click the "Recover autosave" link to find the things I forgot to save.
It made sense to us to try to warn you as soon as you try to navigate away, so you could save before you ever had to recover.
We've tapped into your browser's existing "you have unsaved changes on this page" functionality now to provide just that:
When you've made changes to an article and you try to navigate away, if you haven't hit Save, your browser will now throw a warning that you have unsaved changes (this may be formatted a bit differently depending on the browser you're using):
Sample unsaved changes pop-up
Clicking Leave Page will still navigate you away, and you'd need to use the recovery autosave steps we have to recover what you didn't save. Clicking Stay on Page will let you remain on the page so you can click that ever-useful Save button.
You'll see this message if you've change anything about the article without saving, including:
- The body of the article itself
- Title
- Permalink
- All metadata at the bottom of the editor (Tags, Search Phrases, etc.)
- All righthand column metadata (such as groups, publishing status, etc.)
If you have unsaved changes, you'll see this triggered if you:
- Click the yellow Back button in the upper right or the floating save footer
- Click your browser's Back button
- Click on the link to open a different version
- Try to close your browser window
Hopefully these changes help catch any unsaved changes along the way, so you never need to use a recover autosave, and won't have a nagging feeling that you forgot to save an important change!
