Well, now you will at least get a warning if you start posting or editing something and try to navigate away. I am going to work on having it save drafts locally to protect against browser crashes as well.
Ah, yes, in fact I think this may be the most important improvement you can make. I type all my long posts in a text editor just to prevent this. On the Mac, at least in Firefox, Command-Shift-left/right arrow, normally used to navigate to the start/end of a line of text, will cause the browser to navigate back/forward, wiping the post I was trying to reposition the cursor in. This doesn't happen in other forum software, so I had to learn the hard way to stop using that key combo whenever I'm on this particular forum and use Option-Shift-arrow instead to move one word at a time. It was a very Pavlovian learning experience to become disabused of that shortcut through the trauma of lost posts (think of animals being shocked electrically instead of rewarded with food).
What you are describing sounds more like a forum coerced into use as a Wiki.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you referring to my examples of editing old posts? Updating the first post in a thread is very common practice for threads that are used for:
- releases (software, charts, etc.), because usually the first post should be changed to reflect later versions when they're released (a link might need to be updated, or an instruction changed),
- compilation threads ("Let's compile a list of examples where the Society's publications contradicted modern-day medical wisdom"), and
- "papers" which might need corrections based on subsequent discussion. E.g., this was the most labor-intensive topic I ever created, but despite my best efforts I still made a few factual errors which were pointed out by other members. If I could have edited the original post, it would have prevented my giving out any incorrect information in what I felt was a very important post that deserved a lot of attention from active Witnesses.