Auto Saving Inconsistencies

[vikasrohit]

With #659 application was supposed to remove support of auto saving for all fields except the specification field. However, it seems there are still few places where it is auto saving the challenge. Trying to have a list of what is saved automatically and what not.
Fields which are still auto saved:

• Specification
• Timeline template change
• Reset Phases button immediately saves the phases

@acshields I think it is confusing what is auto saved and what is not. Should we just skip auto saving logic altogether. IMO, auto saving is good for documents but not for a complex object like challenge. If we only keep auto saving for the specification text/html, it still confuses users.

[acshields]

@vikasrohit - Been giving this some thought. My initial reaction was "let's turn off auto-saving for all fields for now."

However, I did think of one "future" development item, which might rely on this capability. Wanted to ask your opinion on whether this capability would be helpful for this future capability, or if it is unrelated. Here is a brief description of what I am thinking on from the UI/UX in the future:
-The set-up questions would be broken out into clear, distinct sections (Ex. Basic Details, Work Participants, Work Specifications, Prizes, Timeline, etc.)
-In some of the sections the questions would have default answers provided. If the user wants too, they can edit the default in some sort of Advanced Settings. However, if they do not make any edits I do want to require that they click a "Confirm" button at the end of each section, so that they acknowledge that the defaulted answers are what they want.

So, my question is this: would that "Confirm" action benefit at all by having auto-saving capabilities, in your opinion?

[vikasrohit]

@acshields I don't think the having sections with their own Confirm button can be benefitted with Auto save feature. In fact it is exact opposite to the Auto Save i.e. when we have the Confirm button at each section, we don't need Auto Save at all. To me, auto save is always confusing.

[acshields]

@vikasrohit - Noted! I agree with you. In that case, we can remove auto-saving from all fields.