Prompt before closing window when you've entered a reply

seamus

I'm sure this happens to everyone from time to time. You enter text in the quick reply box or the normal post box, you get distracted or you go off to research something. Then you forget about the post, accidentally close the window and woe, your post is gone.

Firefox has a handy, "Reopen last closed tab" facility (Ctrl+Shift+T) which will usually recover your text, but only if you catch it in time. If you accidentally close five windows at once, it's gone.

There is a Javascript function - window.onbeforeunload - which allows you to provide a message to the user before the window unloads the current document - either because it's closing or because you've clicked a link. This message box provides "OK" and "Cancel" buttons which allow the user to abort the window closing.

The message given is usually along the lines of "You have entered data into this form. If you navigate away from this window, you will lose your data, do you wish to continue?"

You could use this function to check when someone has entered something into a quick reply box or a normal post box (or for PMs) too, and give a warning that they're going to lose their work.

I know some people abhor Javascript messages and warnings, but in this case I think it'll be handy - it'll only appear when someone is going to lose some work they've done.