Find drafts via menu option?

[Transform]

Sometimes when responding to a post, I get distracted and wander off into some other part of the forum and forget about a post that may have had some worthwhile level of effort put into it. It would be good if there was an option available for pulling up these lost drafts, if it doesn't already exist and I've simply failed to find it.

I'd view it as a subsection of bookmarking - for which, incidentally, I could do with find out a bit more about searching and sorting options, if anyone happened to have a few tips.

Failing all that, I'll knuckle down and (gasp!) use my [knuckle] brain, I guess.

 

[Nydex]

It would be great to have a centralized access to saved drafts, but that means having the ability to fetch data from that database, and from what I can see in XenForo's documentation, it doesn't provide such features OOTB. The closest thing I could find is this Notepad plugin but it's not exactly the same, as it operates on your own profile instead of under other users' posts.

I couldn't find anything else that resembles the functionality you refer to. If there is indeed none, the only way would be a custom implementation of a plugin that allows that, but for that to happen I'll have to learn PHP and play around with the backend of the forum, but that's not something I have a say in.

@The Traveler and @dreamer042 what do you think?

 

[Transform]

It would be great to have a centralized access to saved drafts, but that means having the ability to fetch data from that database, and from what I can see in XenForo's documentation, it doesn't provide such features OOTB. The closest thing I could find is this Notepad plugin but it's not exactly the same, as it operates on your own profile instead of under other users' posts.

I couldn't find anything else that resembles the functionality you refer to. If there is indeed none, the only way would be a custom implementation of a plugin that allows that, but for that to happen I'll have to learn PHP and play around with the backend of the forum, but that's not something I have a say in.

@The Traveler and @dreamer042 what do you think?

Speaking from an entirely naïve viewpoint, it seems to me to be a matter of where the draft data is actualy stored. If it's a local cookie or similar, I suppose I could just hack into that, although that's a bit of an ask for the average phone user. If it's server side, then yes, all those possibly more complicated steps would appear to apply.

I suspect the data is local though, as I've not noticed drafts synchronising between different devices. One further observation is that, in the native mobile app, when temporarily navigating away from a draft - say, to search for a link or a quote, perhaps - there seems to be about a 25% chance that the draft disappears entirely. I would guess this has to do with the timing of autosaves. I'll see how it performs in this respect once I remember to click the 'save draft' icon in similar circumstances.

 

[Nydex]

I'm not sure how the drafts are saved. I doubt it's a cookie because a draft can contain all sorts of multimedia - images, videos, documents, etc - and saving all of that in a cookie seems beyond impractical. I would guess it's some kind of server-side dynamic cache with a short TTL (time to live) that corresponds to the draft duration setting chosen in the admin panel.

 

[dreamer042]

This appears to already be in place server side The current settings are to store drafts for 192 hours and save drafts every 20 seconds.

"If enabled, drafts will be periodically sent to the server and stored to allow users to resume working on their messages later."

I suspect losing the data may be due to local browser settings, firefox on android is notorious for this, particularly with private tabs or if you have it set to automatically clear cache on close. If using chrome I'd suggest checing the memory saver settings in the browser and if using other browsers it might be worth checking the battery saver settings for the browser application in the operating system.

 

[Transform]

This appears to already be in place server side The current settings are to store drafts for 192 hours and save drafts every 20 seconds.

"If enabled, drafts will be periodically sent to the server and stored to allow users to resume working on their messages later."

I suspect losing the data may be due to local browser settings, firefox on android is notorious for this, particularly with private tabs or if you have it set to automatically clear cache on close. If using chrome I'd suggest checing the memory saver settings in the browser and if using other browsers it might be worth checking the battery saver settings for the browser application in the operating system.

Thanks, I'll bear those comments in mind and check some settings. Any word on the search option?

 

[dreamer042]

I can't seem to find anything on a search/recover option. I do see there is an phrase in there for "you have saved drafts click here to load", but I'm unable to find a way to actually recover a previously saved draft. I think the code just isn't there on the backend, but maybe Trav can take a look and see if I'm missing something.