At its current state, posting auto save is limited to the cache that your browser saves for the page. It is highly possible though, and maybe quickly attained.

There is a "save" [draft] feature already; it might be possible to automatically trigger it (or, preferably, ask if you want to trigger it) after a period of inactivity. (Someone with more JavaScript experience than I might even be able to write a GreaseMonkey script to do this, and you might want to search the library of existing scripts for one, since phpBB is a very common blog platform.)

I've noticed that the browser objects (with an "are you sure?" confirmation dialog) when I try to close a tab with unsaved "form data" on some sites. I don't know what triggers this, but it might be possible to leverage this to warn about closing tabs with HW posts in progress.

This looks like it could be a very handy feature. I lose posts all the time.

As Aliza says, It would be handy, and I lose my posts all the time.

That reminds me: I do kno that there are Chrome and Firefox extensions (the name I remember for a Firefox one is "Lazarus", I think) that "remember" text box contents like that for you, even past a browser restart.


When I've seen the "unsaved form data" warning, it's been clearly a browser feature, triggered by something about the page in question. As I have no idea whatsoever what makes some sites trigger it and some sites not, I have my doubts on how easy it might turn out to be to implement.

If it's implemented client-side (as a Greasemonkey script, for example) I expet they would go with other saved drafts, while if it were implemented on the server side they could be sent to a special folder for "auto-saves." (This is a detail that would not have occurred to me, since my "saved drafts" folder is nearly always empty.)

I'm filing this stuff away in my head, y'all - I'll see what I can do, but no guarantees. Meantime, this thread can be locked/archived