ckeditor
Help users understand their comments are NOT saved when they shift focus from the Comments dialog and it minimizes.
Comments are NOT saved when users shift focus from the Comments dialog and it minimizes. But the formatting makes them think it is.
Issue:
- Users highlight some text, click add comment and get the comment dialog
- They start adding a comment.
- IF they, instead of clicking save in the comment dialog, click outside the comment dialog (like into the text somewhere), the comment dialog minimize, and the user sees the comment markup, like if everything was saved and ok.
- BUT, since the comment was not really saved, if they submit the text (or in our system, save a version of it), the comment is gone. And document author is understandably angry.
Improvement: Could you add a way to: a) Not allow minimizing of dialog by shift of focus b) Some way for us to pick up on not-saved comments, so we can alert users before submission/saving of text. c) The very least have the markup of unsaved comments show different than the saved ones (different color, some highlight/border/stripes...). So users know that there is something up.
Other suggestions for this issue is of course welcome.
📃 Other details
- Browser: All
- OS: All
- CKEditor version: 35., but I've verified that this issue still exist in the current v37 demo.
- Installed CKEditor plugins: Comments
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b) Some way for us to pick up on not-saved comments, so we can alert users before submission/saving of text.
When there's a non-saved comment thread (or a reply), we add a pending action to the editor, to handle exactly this scenario -- let the user know that something is "going on" in the background. Pending actions are used by variety of our features, including comments or autosave.
However, pending actions are not handled in any way by default. That is, you need to add your own handling for them. The exception is an autosave feature -- if you use autosave feature, you will get some default pending actions handling (there will be a confirmation box displayed by the browser when the user will want to leave the website). Try the autosave demo. Raise the fake delay a bit, write something and refresh the browser tab.
You can find more info on how to handle pending actions in the API docs. Especially, first and hasAny properties should be of use to you. You can also get inspired by the autosave plugin integration.
As I mentioned, a pending action is added both when a new thread is created and when you type a reply.
Hope this helps!
a) Not allow minimizing of dialog by shift of focus
c) The very least have the markup of unsaved comments show different than the saved ones (different color, some highlight/border/stripes...). So users know that there is something up.
I am not sure if preventing minimizing the annotation would be the best UX, however we could add a small warning icon to the highlight (at the beginning or at the end of the commented content) if the comment thread was not saved. I will add this idea to our internal issues tracker.
I am not sure if preventing minimizing the annotation would be the best UX
Even if it's not the best UX, it may be the one people are familiar with, it's handled this way in GDocs. Or Notion which forces the action of discard/cancel when you focus away from a comment. Food for thought!
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