Autosave not working on Confluence comments - enormously frustrating

Question

I've had this happen to me several times now - and my colleagues in the same organization report they have experienced it as well - writing a long comment on a Confluence page, accidentally navigate away from the page and then the work is ... all gone.

There is a support doc that says that work is "autosaved" and that it appears in drafts either on dashboard or in user profile, but we don't find that to be the case.  The documentation is inconsistent though, elsewhere it says you can save the document if you want it to appear in drafts.  When I Save then of course I don't lose the work, but that also publishes and notifies people by email.

I've taken to clicking save every few minutes, so my colleagues get spammed during my composing process.

Any suggestions?

Andreas_zjxncr · Answer

@Spencer Greene Autosave does not work for page comments. Vote for this feature request here: Add auto-save/draft feature for comments

Spencer Greene_rzfpmx · Answer

Interesting!  It is page comments, which in our case are often very long and involved.  I did a quick test just now and, as you indicate, there is a "leave page" warning - but I and my colleagues have definitely lost work on many occasions and not seen this warning in the past.  Not 100% sure how to reproduce it; and of course I don't want to risk losing work again by trying it.  If I do accidentally observe it again I'll take note of circumstances.

Diego_88dj6o · Answer

Hello @Spencer Greene!

I would like to understand a little more about you current situation. You mentioned that “writing a long comment on a Confluence page” but after that, you also said “The documentation is inconsistent though, elsewhere it says you can save the document if you want it to appear in drafts”

The first part gives off the impression that you are talking about either page comments or inline comments. Those are not autosaved when you leave the page. You can check more about them here:

* [Confluence Cloud] Comment on pages and blog posts

These are the warnings I receive when I try to leave the page or cancel the comment creation:

All of them tell me that the content will be lost.

Now, if we are talking about pages they are indeed auto-saved. You can check the whole documentation here:

* [Confluence Cloud] Create, edit, and publish a page - Drafts

However, if I simply leave the page by either navigating elsewhere or closing the tab, there is a message saying that content will be lost. There are some tips on how to work with on-going work in our documentation:

We recommend only keeping your work as a draft when it's in a very early stage. This is because changes can't be tracked in a draft, and you can't roll back to previous editing sessions - both of which you can do for published pages.

Instead, it's recommended you publish your page even while it's in mid-work, and do one of the following:

Insert status element to mark your page work-in-progress — You can also change this to say under review, done, needs revising, looking for feedback, or any other step of your workflow.

Move your pages as you work — If you've got an external facing site, or if your team is writing something like policies for the rest of your organization, you can work on them in your team space, and then move them to an external facing space once they're done. Alternatively, you can work on something in your personal space, and then once it's been polished, move it to the official space where it needs to be.

Lock down pages until ready — Working on something that you don't want everyone to know about until it's ready? Lock down your page while you work on it, and only change the page restrictions once it's ready to go public.

Let us hear from you!