Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Exit Page Confirmation

Another short post by yours truly. One fateful day aeons ago, I was typing out a response most grand, when tragedy struck. I unintentionally clicked off of the text window, hit backspace, and my glorious prose was gone!

I'd like to suggest a confirmation dialog (preferably along the lines of: You are about to leave this page! Proceed? [YES] [NO]) that pops up if the user has something typed out in the text box that lets the users know if they unintentionally hit the Forwards or Back button in the browser to prevent something like that from happening.

Y E S 👏👏👏

the easiest solution to this would be to implement something similar to the typical chrome prompt of 'changes might not be saved,' which in itself is a fairly menial code. i highly support this suggestion, as it'd be much more feasible than attempting to implement an autosave/draft feature for messages.

Considering things accidental erasure/overwrite (a real problem on phones, which lack ctrl+z), unexpected browser errors resulting in browser closure, power loss, etc, I'd be more for some sort of autosave feature. Sometimes the browser will remember what I have typed if I leave the page and come right back, but that's not reliable, and a confirmation wouldn't help in those other cases.

Or course, I'm sure an autosave feature would be a lot harder to incorporate, since it would need to periodically check what we've written, remember, potentially keep track of which thread it was meant to be a reply to, etc.

And exit page confirmation would probably still be helpful on its own, though. Accidentally clicking links or back, especially on mobile, can be a real pain.

There are browser extensions that can help with this problem for now:
Text Input Recover Extension (Google Chrome)

Typio Form Recovery (Google Chrome)

Form Vault (Google Chrome)

Form History Control (Firefox)

Textarea Cache (Firefox)

Save Text to File (Firefox)