Forum Updates: Autosaving options

Guerrilla

TLDR; You can edit options for autosaving drafts in your profile. You can autosave on server or browser local storage or disable autosaves altogether.

One or two of you have expressed their dislike with the arguably pretty trigger happy autosaving on the site, so over the weekend I coded a plugin that lets you choose how autosaving should work. I realize this may seem kind of trivial to a lot of people, but as someone who's supposedly in the privacy business, when not running middling science fiction art forums, it's actually pretty important to me how I handle your data. So the problem was that every 60 seconds Vanilla autosaves whatever you're writing and stores it in the database, which seems innocent enough, but it is still data that the site collects from you, without you explicitly telling it to do that. Now, a lot (most) sites do this kind of thing, but I like to hold us to a higher standard and try to aspire to an internet that should be rather than the one we're stuck with. (Why yes, I do get kind of smug, when asked about it at parties, or would do, if someone ever asked... or invited me to parties... ). So, instead of adding a line to to the Terms of Service telling you to deal with and leaving it as is, I'm giving you a choice.

I haven't changed the default behavior though. I realize most people probably don't care either way, so I'm not going needlessly to mess with their user experience.

Anyway, if you go to edit your profile, you will find a shiny new option under the Theme Chooser for Autosave Options. From there you can select whether you want your autosaves on the server, your browser's local storage or disabled. Here's a quick rundown of the options:

Server (default option):

• Every 60 seconds or so, Vanilla will save whatever you may have typed in any given textbox on the site into the database.
• If you navigate away, or access the same page with a different client, your draft will be there waiting for you to continue writing. Pretty convenient.
• You can access your drafts (and delete them) on the My Drafts page.
• It's not easily readable as such, but if someone were to gain access to the database, they could read all the secrets you typed but never posted.

Local storage:

• After every keystroke a copy of your text will be saved in the local storage of your browser. (Local Storage is part of the HTML 5 specification. Any browser worth using these days should support it, but obviously your local settings will influence things)
• If you navigate away, and return to the same page, whatever you typed will be waiting for you in the same textbox, but only on the same browser on the same device, and provided you don't empty local storage in between sessions.
• Stores CategoryIDs (forums), Titles and Bodies, so can store new topics or comments.
• Doesn't send any data to the server before you explicitly tell it to (by posting your message or hitting Save Draft button).
• Which also means, it doesn't show up in My Drafts, unless you hit Save Draft.

Disabled:

• No autosaving anywhere. Save Draft works the usual way.

Save Draft will continue to work the same way with all options. Drafts get saved in the database, and you can access them in My Drafts.