Question about how this site works regarding replies that are deleted before submission?

I’m curious about something. A couple of times recently, I typed out a response to some post, thought about whether there was any point, and then decided to delete the response that had not yet been submitted.

Yet, whenever I return to that thread, there is my typed-out response, right in the box at the bottom, no matter how many times I attempt to delete it. Let me be extremely clear: it was NEVER submitted. I just typed, thought about, and erased it.

WHY is it still showing up, whenever I go to those couple of threads on which I was going to respond, but decided not to bother?

This is kind of creepy to me, and I’m now thinking I should compose all responses elsewhere first, and then if I decide not to submit it, it’s gone. Is there some kind of keystroke capture thing on this site? Can someone more tech-savvy than me please explain what is going on?

Go to “My Drafts” on the left- you can delete your drafted messages there.

The site autosaves. This isn’t that uncommon with forum sites. I’m not a fan, but I wouldn’t classify it as creepy.

Ah, thank you. I never noticed that listing before, nor knew all my drafts I ever typed were being saved. Deleted. Hopefully, that will be the end of it.

You can also just replace your message in the text box with a single letter like x or - and then save draft – this replaces what you have typed previously.

Ah, thanks. Problem resolved. I wondered why things I had deleted kept reappearing! Apparently just erasing it does nothing.

We used to have the problem when you’d write out a long post, and then it would time out, and you’d lose everything you wrote. I think this “fixes” that problem, but yes, you have to delete your draft if you change your mind about posting something.

This way much better. The only thing is that it is non obvious how to delete it while you are looking at the reply.

The only drafts that ever disappear for me are the ones I want kept, LOL.

This CC feature creeped me out too, when I went back to a post from weeks, months back, and my draft was still down ther.

Agree with college_query. Was very maddening when a long typed post would be accidentally lost Wish we’d get back to the 20 minute edit feature instead of 15, but oh well… so it goes.