Tickets and ticket comments are not saved automatically

[Philippe Cloutier <chealer@…>]

Writing a ticket or replying to one often takes a lot of time. For instance, writing Debian ticket #677948 must have taken hours. Much of that is research, but losing the text shortly before it is submitted can be costly.

Good ITS engines feature some form of autosaving, so that a mere browser crash does not require spending hours to recover. Even GitHub, a fighter-brand forge, somewhat supports autosaves. Unfortunately, I can see no sign of that on Trac, either in documentation or empirically. This website does not seem to automatically save even just the description when creating a ticket, nor the comment when modifying. I also lost a draft ticket I was reporting to WordPress’s Meta Trac when my PC rebooted. I am therefore confident that trac.edgewall.org does not save tickets and ticket comments automatically, most likely because the Trac version it uses does not do that by default.

Assuming this is not a configuration issue or due to an outdated Trac version, solving issue #3204 would provide almost all the backend needed to automatically save draft tickets on the server.

Ideally, autosaves would:

1. cover all fields in all contexts:
   1. ticket fields when creating
   2. ticket fields and the comment when modifying
2. save contents constantly on the client, and semi-regularly (perhaps at a configurable frequency) on the server.

But I would happily consider a basic implementation saving textarea fields anywhere as a sufficient solution.

This report is from Philippe "Chealer" Cloutier. I am subscribing to this ticket, but notifications are broken. Please manually notify me when you write to me or report important progress. I struggle to display my full email address or link to my contact information from this ticket, but my email address is available on Kune ni povos’s contact page.

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