Is there any way to disable this feature when I'm viewing an oldlink or diff? There's rarely a good reason to write a comment on an old revision (overwriting the new revisions), and it also scrolls me away from where I want to look most of the time. Theleekycauldron (talk) 16:40, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/New topic/Flow
There's rarely a good reason to write a comment on an old revision (overwriting the new revisions)
As far as I know, DiscussionTools never overwrites new revisions – even if you write a comment on an older revision, it tries to insert in the newest revision, and doesn’t let you post the comment if it’s unable to do so (which may happen when replying, but not when creating new topics, as “add to the bottom” always works). I don’t say that auto-restore on old revisions is a good thing, but at least it won’t destroy the page history.
I am often reading long pages in diff mode, and I particularly appreciate being able to post a Reply without having to leave the diff page.
Sure, but recovering unsaved changes for a comment written for a different diff? That just seems like a headache.
When I still have the other comment open in another tab, yes, it's a bit of a hassle. But I'd rather have that hassle (a few times a month, in my case) than to not be able to reply until I reload the whole page (i.e., on the order of 100 times a month).
can we enable replies on diff pages but not recover in-progress ones?
I don't know if it's realistically possible to detect that state. Probably @ESanders (WMF) would have an idea about that.
It might be possible to do this technically, but (1) this seems quite rare and (2) someone will then complain that it didn't recover their message if we change it. And then someone will ask to just make it a user preference...
It happens whenever I'm writing a comment on a page and need to check through that page's history for a diff to bring up. It doesn't seem insubstantial?
@Theleekycauldron, did I ever tell you about Ed's magic script? Look at line 4 in m:User:Whatamidoing (WMF)/global.js. It turns the timestamp for comments into a link. (Right-click to copy the link, so you can paste it into your comment.)
Oh, I've wanted that forever! :D thank you very much