ashodnakashian

I never had this issue until I upgraded to 4.1.1 from 3.x last week. Perhaps it is due to a plugin or theme that isn’t up to date with 4.x line, but I have reason to think that’s not the case.

In the span of less than 20 hours I hit the problem twice. The first time was after a long stretch of working on a multi-thousand word post and saving drafts regularly without issue, when I saved the last time (when I was ready to preview) I got the error. I hit ‘Please try again’ and promptly got a note in the reloaded post.php page that the backup was newer than the draft (or something to that effect) and offered me to restore. I could see that everything since the last time I hit save draft was gone from the body (although auto-save was working and I was keeping an eye on it all the time). Restored and don’t think I lost anything.

Today I came back to find that my session had expired. I had left WP on a New Post page, which I hadn’t typed anything in (not even a title). It was late when I finished yesterday and even though I wanted to start typing some notes for the new topic, I retired. I punched in my creds and logged in again. I gave the page a title and immediately went to work typing a few hundred words within 10-20 minutes when I felt I had to save draft before continuing. Once I hit save draft, I noticed that the page had no URL! A clear sign of a problem. Before I knew it, I had that infamous page again. Nothing I did could retrieve even a single word from that post. Nothing was saved.

I went back to the Posts page and didn’t find it there either. Upon hitting New Post and typing a title, I immediately saw it waved and a URL generated.

This leads me to think it’s an issue with the draft getting saved in the browser’s local storage and WP failing to warn the user that drafts are not saved. This could be due to expired cookies (the only common thing between the two cases is that the pages had been open for a long time).

At any rate, I think WP can, and has a responsibility, to warn the user when auto-saving drafts doesn’t work. A note at the top of the page or a pop-up should be enough so users at least copy-paste their text elsewhere before trying to save or publish. To me the fact that at least in the case of the new post WP failed to auto-save it even a single time but did’t warn me is already a problem. There is no reason to wait until the user takes some action and surprise them with an incomprehensible page and lost productivity.

I’m more than appreciative of the efforts of volunteers and WP community, and this is meant as a possible help to improve it, not a criticism as-such.

Let me know if I can provide more info.
Thanks.

Hi ExtraPaul,

Please try using the latest version (6.7) which has a number of fixes and improvements including Amazon searching and new CSS styles instead of hard-coded styles.

-Ash

Hi TechnoMom,

Please try using the latest version (6.7) which has a number of fixes and improvements including Amazon searching.

-Ash

Hi,

What were the search keywords? It could be that there are no results with the given keywords. Does any search return results at all?

Thanks!
-Ash

Thanks for the feedback. I’ve added a bug-report here. Will try to reproduce and fix in a future version.

Thanks for the feedback. I’ve added a bug-report here. Will try to reproduce and fix in a future version.

If possible, please add sample text and plugin version number.