Auto-save your Writing!

[Chaaruzu_Corner]

I now have TWO instances of me losing my writing progress because of it. One when I tried to copy a word and ended up refreshing it and the other happened JUST NOW when I long press a word at the bottom of the site. (using mobile)

So please for us mobile users when our screens are more sensitive to changes, please add in where it just auto saves your writing!

 

[Llamadragon]

It would be nice to have that. But in the meanwhile, consider downloading some sort of offline writing app where it would be much harder to mis-click and lose progress. I use Pages. Just copy-paste when you’re done.

 

[Scribbler]

I've never actually had this problem but I have worried about it before when I tried to save my draft and I couldn't connect to the site. But when it did happen I just pressed the back button and all my words would still be there.

 

[XianPiete]

I lost a chapter due to the author's incompetence the other day (I accidentally clicked the browser close button instead of a tab close, oops!) It would be nice though if it was possible for the site itself to take pity on me, or as llamadragon suggested I could write in an actual word processing application, but then that would be an extra step. I'm an author not a doctor!

 

[lnv]

I now have TWO instances of me losing my writing progress because of it. One when I tried to copy a word and ended up refreshing it and the other happened JUST NOW when I long press a word at the bottom of the site. (using mobile)

So please for us mobile users when our screens are more sensitive to changes, please add in where it just auto saves your writing!

You shouldn't be writing in there to begin with, there is no spellcheck nor grammar check, and you should always keep offline backups.

 

[XianPiete]

You shouldn't be writing in there to begin with, there is no spellcheck nor grammar check, and you should always keep offline backups.

I use a chrome add on for that.

 

[Deleted member 5560]

Google docs is free, has an aggressive auto save function as well as a save history you can access, and you can download files to work offline. I don’t recommend writing your chapters in ScribbleHub also just because having a back up copy of all your chapters is common sense.

That being said, I think something as simple as a pop up prompt that appears telling you that you have unsaved work if you try to refresh or close out without saving would be a nice feature, for people who accidentally do both the above. Though I work on my chapters in another program, things like formatting tables have to be done in the editor and can be super finicky, and I did lose a lot of progress on that when I accidentally closed the tab...

 

[Chaaruzu_Corner]

Sigh I think you're right guys, I should start using other applications for writing... But I like writing it out of my head dammit! XD

Plus there's a limit to how much I can copy and paste with my phone, so unless if I copy it in chunks (which is very inefficient) then it would be better to just have an auto-save feature.

And lastly I think it's pretty weird why you would use a different writing website when there's already a writing website by the name of Scribble Hub, and not use the writing function here. I'm not saying its bad or anything but I thought it's a weird thing to do

So I still like for SH to have one, at the very least leave the progress intact when you leave and reload the tab.

 

[Chaaruzu_Corner]

You shouldn't be writing in there to begin with, there is no spellcheck nor grammar check, and you should always keep offline backups.

Uhm I did say that I use my phone lol
Well I prefer when I just write from out of my head so there's really no backups except for the ones I Save Draft on SH.

 

[lnv]

I use a chrome add on for that.

Those don't do realtime checking though, right? Plus you still need a place to keep notes anyways.

Sigh I think you're right guys, I should start using other applications for writing... But I like writing it out of my head dammit! XD

Plus there's a limit to how much I can copy and paste with my phone, so unless if I copy it in chunks (which is very inefficient) then it would be better to just have an auto-save feature.

And lastly I think it's pretty weird why you would use a different writing website when there's already a writing website by the name of Scribble Hub, and not use the writing function here. I'm not saying its bad or anything but I thought it's a weird thing to do

So I still like for SH to have one, at the very least leave the progress intact when you leave and reload the tab.

Uhm I did say that I use my phone lol
Well I prefer when I just write from out of my head so there's really no backups except for the ones I Save Draft on SH.

Yes, use apps, they exist for a reason. A publishing website is not the same thing as a writing website. Your printer driver can do some changes to the document, that doesn't mean you should we writing in your printer driver instead of the actual printer. Plus, what if SH gets hacked, server crashes or corruption? You should always have backups.

As for copy and pasting, since when was there a limit? I mean sure there must be a limit, but I've never had problem copy and pasting long documents on my phone. I just tested right now to copy and paste a long chapter and no problem.

If you really want, there are addons for firefox mobile that autosave, but again I suggest using an app.

 

[Jemini]

I lost a chapter due to the author's incompetence the other day (I accidentally clicked the browser close button instead of a tab close, oops!) It would be nice though if it was possible for the site itself to take pity on me, or as llamadragon suggested I could write in an actual word processing application, but then that would be an extra step. I'm an author not a doctor!

It's best to always have backups of everything you write in some personal file. So, that in mind, writing it in the word document is not an extra step at all. You are going to have to copy-paste at some point one way or another in order to have your back-up copy, so you might as well write it in a document to start with and then save it, basically the original becomes the back-up.

So, say SH goes down for whatever reason, or some malicious hacker gets into your account or an admin's account and deletes all your stories. In my case, I have everything saved and I could have it back up in a few hours. In your case, without backups, your story would be gone for good. As authors, our work is very important to us. You do not want to have it so vulnerable as to have only one copy of it existing. You always want there to be backups somewhere.

 

[XianPiete]

Those don't do realtime checking though, right? Plus you still need a place to keep notes anyways.

Yeah, it does real-time checking, just like Word or another real office suite. My writing style may be a little different from yours though, I don't keep notes at all. Writing to a web form is super easy for me. I do make backups though.

 

[jinxs2011]

As others have said, I wouldn't recommend writing your chapter in scribblehub. I generally write in word first.
When i'm on mobile i use google docs. Nowhere near as good, without as large a vocabulary and not as good grammar checking. Generally I'll write a chapter in google docs, copy it over to my main word doc, go over it to check spelling and grammar and whatnot, then copy it over to scribblehub and put in the things like author's comments, horizontal lines and the like.

 

[NiQuinn]

This is pretty dangerous practice (not life-threatening but dangerous in a sense coz mobile browsers are unreliable). You're living on the edge by writing directly to SH. If you're writing on your mobile, why not find an app like jotterpad or something like it. Paid for my jotterpad to have it directly linked to dropbox so I wouldn't have to worry about backups. It hasn't failed me yet. Haven't posted anything in SH though but writing apps are convenient for writing on the go.

This though:

That being said, I think something as simple as a pop up prompt that appears telling you that you have unsaved work if you try to refresh or close out without saving would be a nice feature, for people who accidentally do both the above.

Would be a great feature.

 

[BenJepheneT]

google docs and copy paste is a thing just letting y'all know

 

[tiaf]

Auto safe would be nice. I copy and paste from google docs, but I still end up doing a lot of editing e.g. for footnotes, spoilers, images, author notes, etc.

I think it happened two times already, that I misclicked or refreshed the site by accident.