The corresponding request for JIRA is JRA-23284. The JIRA team have recently re-opened this issue and are looking into its implementation, you can watch the issue to receive updates.

Does anybody know if there is a corresponding ticket for JIRA that we can upvote?

For Confluence 5.7, we solved this issue in the following way:

In Edit mode:
1. we renamed "Cancel" to "Close", and
2. Clicking "Close" will NOT discard your work (a draft is saved!)

In Preview mode:
1. We disabled the "Cancel" link (it now says "Close", but is greyed out). To return to the Editor, simply click "Edit")

In the Comment Editor:
1. We kept it as "Cancel" and the behaviour as before (no drafts are saved),
2. BUT, we now show a confirmation dialog to warn you that your comment will be lost if you click Cancel.

As always, your feedback is welcome!

Henk | Senior PM - Confluence

Is there a corresponding issue to fix this in JIRA as well? I want to upvote and comment on that one too, but I couldn't quickly find it.

This should be fixed!

Please please please can this be resolved!!!

As a workaround people can check out lazarus, a plugin for chrome and ffox. Saves all the stuff you've typed on a page in case it crashes / fails.

Come on guys, as per the comments above, every other piece of software ever written will confirm with the user that they are going to lose unsaved changes.
Permanently lost data (i.e. time+effort) > minor annoyance on those rare times when I started editing a document and then changed my mind.

I would also suggest that while in preview mode the cancel button shouldn't even be available. I just lost days of work because, for a brief moment, I though "cancel" meant "get out of preview mode".

And plus one for being able to save named drafts. Sometimes you are editing something but then realise that you want to park your changes and only apply at some later date. Having to copy-and-pasting into a text editor seems pretty primitive for Atlassian software.

Happened to me again. Fortunately, I'm so nervous about pressing Edit / Preview / Save, I had a draft in TextEdit.

Happy Anniversary CONF-7526! coming up on 8 years? really? Wow, it's been real, it's been fun, but it hasn't been real fun.

Brilliant, just lost all the work I did yesterday afternoon and this morning, and now I have literally nothing to show my boss. Thanks, Atlassian!

Just lost a lot of work because of this... Every editor on planet has a confirmation dialog before allowing you to lose work. Why Confluence doesn't?

You can implement it yourself using javascript in Custom HTML>At end of the HEAD. For a simple native browser dialog add the following:
<script>
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
jQuery('#rte-button-cancel > .trigger-text').click(function()

);
});
</script>

I lost a half-day document because of this.. Any plans to fix this?

Atlassian, can you please put a good UX person on this issue rather than an engineer? I think there's a good case for this feature, and the current bug really detracts from content authors feeling safe to use Confluence for writing content. Imagine, you spend hours writing up something and then click on a wrong button and the work is completely gone? Usually if you accidentally delete something, there is a command-z to undo the action. With Confluence, right now it's not possible. I've often used google docs or word instead to write content to avoid having this potential issue.

Have some amount of persistence for cancelled drafts and/or prompt users if they have made a certain amount of edits, or maybe even the length of time the draft has been authored? It will make writing on Confluence less risky. Please + thanks.

Just lost a lot of work on a brand new page, which I cancelled by mistake with a single click of the mouse.
This is not how things should work, and Atlassian guys you need to respect your users who have been asking for this for 7 years.

I'm sure you can easily address the concern about making things cumbersome in the "normal" case, e.g. only show the warning if a significant amount of unsaved work (e.g. over 200 characters) exists.

When previewing, the options are Edit, Save and Cancel. To me "Cancel" seems like the link to click to exit preview mode, and the Edit button can barely be seen against the background. Surely you could do one of the following to improve this blatant usability issue:

• Add confirmation dialog warning of permanent loss of data
• Save drafts for new pages in the same way they are saved when updating existing pages
• Change the link/button names, e.g. "Cancel" could be "Discard Changes", especially when in preview mode

Just had a user have this happen today. I like the label associated with this issue, 'paper-cut'.

It would be nice if someone could change the affects version to something more recent so that maybe this would get some more attention.

At the very least, a draft is a draft is a draft. Keep the drafts, even if the user does hit Cancel by accident instead of Save.

This item proves that Atlassian doesn't care about its users.

This thread shows overwhelming support for implementation of a cancel warning dialog with good reason. I can't imagine this would be difficult to implement and therefore I find it difficult to understand why it has not been done.

If the cancel confirmation dialog is really truly too much of an imposition on some users, then could it not be configurable in 'General Configuration'? Then admins who turn this off can be accountable to an executive who loses 4 hours of work!

I got quite annoyed when I hit "preview" and mistake "Edit" (which is counter intuitive) with "Cancel" (which seem to be the logical choice IMHO).

Since last time (yesterday) I lost 4 hours of work, I wrote a fix myself:
It can be used with Firefox or Chrome (greasemonkey or Tampermonkey)
Code is here: http://pastebin.com/eQ2Hgn1x

Twitch of the hand and ended up pressing Cancel instead of Save. Lost all my work. Please fix !!!!!

Ridiculous that JIRA is not addressing this. Can we please get an official response?

Back button also worked for me on Chrome but I still think an undo cancel or a confirmation of cancel is vital.

I tried the back button at the time but, alas, no joy

Thanks for the tip though - maybe next time!

Ian, if you still have the browser tab open then it's worth trying clicking the back button. This happened to me last week and I was relieved to realize that my text was still there (this was in Chrome).

I still feel that this is a major problem with Confluence as you don't always realize that you've missed the save button and hit Cancel instead - surely it's an accessibility issue if nothing else.

Arghhhhhhh. This just happened to me and I've lost two hours work.

I went from edit mode, to preview mode, then pressed cancel, presuming it would take me back to edit mode and I lost everything.

Cancel should come with a pop-up warning, and be disabled when in preview mode.

Like I said on CONF-25416:
This issue has caused me to lose work several times. It is extremely annoying that, when there are unsaved changes, Confluence does not ask you if you are sure you want to Cancel as doing so will cause your changes to be irrecoverably lost. It's especially strange that Confluence does not ask you to confirm this action even when a draft has been autosaved. It just goes ahead and quits edit mode and then deletes the autosave draft so that, once you realise what you've done, you can't retrieve some/all of your changes. Even the humble Microsoft Notepad warns you if you quit while there are unsaved changes. Zero points for usability on this!

This is still a big problem because the Save and Cancel buttons are too close together. It would be less of a problem if cancelling an edit to a page didn't also delete the draft copy.

Why on earth do we need a Cancel button anyway - you can just close the tab or the browser and your changes are cancelled. Other text editing programs don't have a Cancel button.

Agreed. Add this already!

It shouldn't be hard to auto-save drafts for canceled pages for a day or some other configurable time; after that time purge them from the database.

Anyone here with Greasemonkey skillz? This has got to be a 2 line plugin that simply hides or moves the Cancel link, or adds a Javascript prompt to it.

Ridiculous that after 7 years this hasn't been implemented. Cancelling a huge edit (to, say, a JIRA issue) by accident because the cancel button is close to the OK button and having no prompt to discard changes is absolutely unacceptable. Any application ever made (properly) has had a confirmation dialogue to prevent accidentally losing changes.

We have Javascript. FIX THIS.

OK, I just got bit as well. Probably two hours of work lost with no warning.

This is pretty intolerable.

Is there really no technical workaround? Is the data actually purged from the database, or just marked "deleted"? Can someone over there retrieve it?

Grr....

Just lost 2 hours of work. 2 HOURS! No prompts about cancelling (even after 2 hours of editing), no draft history, nothing. We have internal users that swear by Word and I used to laugh them off. I think I've learnt my lesson as it does not appear this CRITICAL feature is going to be implemented.

Atlassian - is there a technical workaround to be able to recover previously auto-deleted drafts? (the drafts that are deleted when you accidentally hit 'Cancel' when editing a page)

Aside from that I think a solution really needs to be addressed for this - either add a confirmation box for cancelling edits, or make it so page drafts are more persistent.

Is there a concern about adding too many dialogue boxes if someone wants to cancel editing a page? I think it would be better to be safe than sorry, as authors of a page are the most important part of a wiki and loosing their work is a big inconvenience. Perhaps there can be a setting that will only have the confirmation box show up if someone has been editing a page for more than 5 minutes or something?

I just lost two hours of work for this same reason. "Cancel" is right next to "Save", and there is no confirmation dialog asking if you really intend to throw away all of your changes, and there is no history or any other way to recover the data. Bad form. This made me Very Grumpy. It made me no longer consider Confluence my trusted friend. Please add a confirmation dialog.

I just lost a bunch of work, again. This after being extremely careful for a few weeks, but today I got lazy about saving, and sure enough: no drafts found, no revisions stored, yet the attachments that I added are still attached, but none of the markup I wrote to be found. This time I have a clear distinct memory of hitting the Save button, though I did so after having the edit window open for a couple of hours.
I'm just guessing here, but Confluence seems to eagerly throw away all of the drafts that it painstakingly collects at any number of opportunities, such as if I create a new page in another tab? At this point I'm deathly afraid of any AJAX dialog that mentions drafts... I assume the end is near. I dunno it seems to imply that there's something wrong with the design pattern: "If a human types information into the edit screen, it is sacred, and should not be thrown away." Seriously, I'm about to switch to Google docs.

7 years... no resolution... that says a lot
Just lost about 5+ hours of intense work... I guess I should have just used notepad or something.
I'll just cut straight to the point as you've wasted enough of my time already.
1. Having an autosave feature is nice, but when it does NOT AUTOMATICALLY SAVE IT IS NOT AUTOSAVE! (I don't use caps lightly)
2. Having a button called "Cancel" which AUTOMATICALLY ERASES YOUR AUTOSAVED DATA IS NOT CANCEL!
3. I'm used to saving a lot (I'm a fellow programmer myself) and Ctrl + S is pretty much like breathing for me, but when Ctrl + S (or the "Save" button) closes the editor every time you press it you are force to rely on the "AUTOSAVING" feature. So I'm guessing you should have named the button "Save and Close".
4. Having a "Preview" button that changes into an "Edit" button is not something you see in a lot of places, it's kind of weird. Having that "Preview" turned "Edit" button placed not that far from a "Cancel" button is pretty weird yet again; why? one might assume it cancels the preview.
...

Something similar to the problems that everyone is reporting just killed 3 hours of very brain-intensive work. I'm completely floored - was literally sitting here typing up the implementation rationale for Atlassian into my yearly project plan (among other things), and it's all gone. I can't even begin to reproduce how the work was lost, because I was trusting it (like I would Google Docs). To say the least, I has the tab open for over 4 hours and either it didn't save a single draft, or it threw them all away. I never saw any user interaction regarding drafts. I think somehow the fact when I clicked save, Confluence saved a version without any of today's changes. I don't think I hit cancel, can't be sure.

It was there, now it's gone. I have used the section editor, clicked preview a few times, was constantly editing. The browser is still open, and I'm still logged in, and it's like nothing ever happened.

Edit: I should also mention that I attached an image file. The image is still there, shows up in activity stream, but the page markup I wrote referring to said image is gone.

Having just lost 2 hours work because of this (missing the Save button by a few pixels), I have to add to the chorus of disapproval. The implemented behavior is inconsistent with Confluence itself (hitting back DOES confirm that you want to lose your work), inconsistent with EVERY OTHER APPLICATION EVER (changes are NEVER lost without confirmation) and it is so easily fixed that I cannot believe it hasn't been so.

1) Just a simple confirmation dialog would be sufficient. Please consider how often the user would make changes then click Cancel to purposely to discard them (I doubt that often) vs how often changes are discarded in error, then factor in the annoyance of the confirmation dialog vs. the annoyance of losing a whole lot of work, plus the realization that the assumed safety net of the autosave doesn't actually help in this case.

2) Alternatively, if you don't want another confirmation dialog, then guys, come on, you're already autosaving drafts. Don't discard them when Cancel is clicked!

Please someone punch me in the face.

what's the status of this? I doesn't look like it's in Confluence 5 either.

Maarten,
Fair points. Thanks for raising your concerns.
I'll make sure this gets addressed in the new editor coming up in Confluence 4.0.
Sherif

This needs to be re-opened and resolved. Here's what any other piece of software I have ever used in the last 20 years does:

• You make edits to a document
• You select File > Close, which is equivalent to the cancel button being discussed here
  IF there are unsaved changes, you are asked if you would like to save them or not.
  IF there are no unsaved changes, the file closes without further question.

David and Charles (see discussion above), I appreciate your desire to keep the user interface uncluttered, but this is absolutely standard stuff for software to warn you before you discard unsaved changes.

As a matter of fact, if you edit a confluence page and navigate away from that page by doing something like hitting the back button on your browser, YOU DO get a common sense dialog box warning you about unsaved changes.

This is simply inconsistent behavior and is a legitimate bug. I am going to submit a new bug along those lines. I am working hard to get my co-workers to accept confluence and start using it seriously. That's going to be a real uphill battle for me if the editor behaves in such a way that they lose their work easily.

John, the idea of a global 'undo' ability is very interesting. Unfortunately, we have no current plans to implement such a feature but are considering it in our future plans. Thanks for the suggestion.

Even with the buttons more separated I've still lost a fair amount of work.

I don't know why a dialog would need to be added. It seems like a lot of other places in the system people are able to recover changes that were lost for whatever reason. Why isn't that same system implemented here?

We've separated the buttons a bit more (CONF-9450).

A better approach than having barriers to deleting content is to allow that content to be recovered easily. Perhaps whenever a user cancels a page edit, they have a small toolbar appear temporarily on the view page telling them something like 'Your cancelled changes will be automatically deleted when you leave this page. 'Click here' to recover them'

If someone wants to think more about how this would be best implemented, eg is leaving the page the best approach and create a separate feature request for it, please link to it here.

I absolutely support this premise request and feel this issue should be reopened. In my opinion, it is poor design to allow a user to accidentally discard data without a safety net. I say this because I have lost a significant amount of work when I slightly missed the save button (it has happened more than once over the years).

Another approach to this could be to separate the save and cancel buttons more. I would have saved more frequently, but I trusted the autosave and didn't expect to have it thrown away so easily...

The Cancel button could opt to not throw up a confirmation if no changes have been made to the page.

By that logic, we should also implement an "are you sure that you're sure?" And an "are you sure you're sure you're sure" dialog, and so on.

annoyance vs permanent data loss? I'm in favor of avoiding permanent data loss.

Your equation is sound

Seriously, how often does this happen?

(amount of annoyance of a confirm dialog) x (number of times people cancel deliberately) > (amout of annoyance of losing an edit) x (number of times people press cancel by mistake)