Drafts lacking versions

[tomkiss]

Hi there!

This is really product feedback, I hope this is the right place for it -

Today an editor had their content wiped out whilst editing their Draft.
I don't really know why. The draft was created by an initial copy/paste action of an article outline. Then, a lot of time was spent refining the article, adding content and so forth. They later hit the "preview" button, and the entire document reverted to the original copy/pasted content.

This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened, but it leaves me having to teach editors not to use the Drafts functionality at all. Which seems like a bad thing?
Due to its lack of versioning its a high-risk feature to use. IMO versioning is basically critical functionality for any document editor (I'm trying to think of a document state whereby a google doc or pages doc couldn't be undone/reverted?).

I never use drafts myself (tbh I've never been quite sure as to their purpose?) But then, I suppose I consider an unpublished entry as a draft of sorts. Although a caveat should be that despite using Craft CMS since the beginning, I find drafts and revisions functionality immensely confusing (I would add, to expand on that a tiny bit: It feels like the underlying technical aspects of these features are negatively impacting the UX). Anyway, rambling - I just wanted to share these experiences as there is has been a sizeable amount of time lost with work due to this, and it causes a lot of frustration when it happens.

[brandonkelly]

Thanks for the feedback.

It would be great to get to the bottom of why the content changes were lost—that should definitely not ever happen.

If you’re able to share your database and Composer files and point us to the entry where this occurred, we can try to look into it.

[mmikkel]

@tomkiss Was this a "real" draft, or a provisional draft (aka "unsaved changes")? If the latter, can you find any messages like "Overwriting an existing provisional draft" in your web.log file for the date in question?

Reason I ask is because we just had something very similar to what you're describing reported today, involving provisional drafts. Currently looking for a way to reproduce it.

[mmikkel]

FWIW, I'm pretty sure I figured out what's going on in our case: #18620