Request: Graceful recovery from excessively long edit sessions
In the event that an edit session is left open too long, you are treated as a spammer and any unsaved (unpreviewed) edits are lost.
Yes, I understand the reason for the edit tickets, and I know that I shouldn't leave a page open too long without saving. But life is life, and there are times you get pulled away from what you are doing and forget to save first.
In any application, failing to save your data for long periods of time leaves you vulnerable to power failures, system lock-ups, internet link failures, etc., etc. However, in this case MoinMoin does not need to become one of these hazards. There are multiple ways that it could prevent you from losing your edits in the event that you screw up and leave your edit open too long, and still not compromise the anti-spam feature.
As I understand it, what allows the ticketing system to hinder spammers is that it requires two separate http: actions in order to get the data saved (in this case, acquire the ticket, then submit changes). In the situation I'm describing, when the ticket expires MoinMoin forgets that you were editing legitimately, and treats you like any other spambot, completely throwing away the text you submitted.
Possible Solutions
I propose that moin still do basically the same thing, only provide the user a way to recover the latest draft of their page. For example, it could treat the save request as a preview, and allow previews to work (but without renewing the edit ticket). The warning would still appear, possibly with a slight rewording that hints to valid users that they can still recover their edits. The recovery path would be to copy the text out of the edit box, then cancel the edit and click edit again, pasting in their copied text.
Another option, simpler to implement and possibly harder for spammers to get around, would be to simply save the latest version of the text in the MoinEditorBackup page.
-- SteveDavison 2007-08-10 02:44:49
See Also
Discussion
Please help testing and provide feedback:
http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/1.9/rev/f59d02d10935 + http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/1.9/rev/172146fe48a2