Prevent losing draft comments on navigation or if a window is closed

[breilly2]

Select Topic Area

Product Feedback

Body

When adding a comment in the "Files changed" area of a PR, anything entered is lost if the window is accidentally closed or another page is visited (even switching between Conversation/Commits/Checks/Files changed tabs). There is no warning alert on window close, and the draft unsubmitted comment is not saved anywhere (even browser local storage) and/or is not easily discovered. This can lead to a frustrating loss of work and time.

I've possibly seen some evidence of unsubmitted comment text on single-line comments being saved, but I don't know if it's GitHub or Chrome (or a Chrome extension) doing that. If it is GitHub, the draft comment is completely undiscoverable and seems to not work at all for comments being added to multiple lines of code in the PR.

Possible enhancements are:

• Present a warning on navigate/close if there are form elements that have been filled out but not saved.
• Save the comment text somewhere and show an indication of unsubmitted comments when viewing the PR. (For comparison, this seems to be the behavior for the comment associated with the review.)

[liach]

I think this problem happens when I type in the comment box too. Sometimes to write pseudocode, I need to open other tabs and accidentally close this one when I navigate back/view changed files; and GitHub just dumps all my efforts.

I strongly agree that either prompting "are you sure to leave and discard unsaved changes" or saving in a cache works well to resolve this issue.

[aaron-williamson-kr]

Just lost an hour writing a comment, clicked a hyperlink in said comment to ensure it went to the right place and it opened in the same window rather than a new window. Lost everything. Really frustrating

[vic-bart]

Spent >1 hr writing a comment for an issue and ended up purging 20+ tabs I had opened, so I didn't realise I accidently closed the drafted comment, which hadn't been sent. Would've helped enormously if a dialogue window popped up warning me that I was drafting a comment before closing the tab (see example).

[kswamin131]

I HATE doing PRs on GitHub for this very reason.
For context this is also an issue in the "Conversations" section, which is where I draft the steps for testing my PRs.
I've lost so many hours or days of work if the site refreshes or I accidentally close or in the latest case, GitHub had issues creating the PR due to a duplicate older PR name and deleted the ENTIRE NEW PR instead of giving a warning before navigating away. Can we fix this at all and cache this data somewhere? SourceTree/Bitbucket/JIRA doesn't have these issues... and that's saying something

[owocado]

This would be immensely helpful. I had typed up a long draft for github issue but my laptop battery reached 0% and it shut down ( I somehow missed it in midst of doing multi-tasking multiple things), when I started it back and restarted the browser, the issues page loaded but empty content.

[shanike]

Happened to me just now.

I was writing an invested and detailed comment, and paused to check some email. By mistake closed the tab and now seem to have lost the comment...

As mentioned in comments above me, a browser alert would be very helpful.

[mstyura]

Oh, this just happen to me - not due to I mis clicked something, but rather stupid company policy forcibly restarted my Chrome just in the middle of typing.