So, this post here will be more of a rant, just as a heads-up. I’m “angy” as some youngster say.

For quite a while, more than a year in fact, I’ve run into this issue of WordPress’ editor not saving correctly. Rather often the Editor will appear to be autosaving… but the “save draft” button switches to “autosaving” and then continues to be in that state, never actually saving, and essentially preventing any publishing of the post or… well… edits being kept, etc.

The band-aid fix to this is to select all blocks, copy them, and then go into a the existing draft in a new tab or into a new draft where you essentially can paste all the blocks into.

To select all blocks, you have to hit Control + A twice, if you’re on Windows. By hitting it once, you only select “everything” in the current block. By hitting it another time, you select everything in the post. This is incredibly nice by the way. I wish saving automatically was that easy.

Anyhow, as I said, this is just a band-aid for an issue that has persisted for a long time now… an issue, btw, that has claimed the lives of many a post that you mistakenly thought was being saved.

Hence, I’ve reached to WordPress’ support and frankly… they told me that they couldn’t replicate the issue and they’ve attached a video to that e-mail response where some person has music going on in the background as they record their screen, showcasing how they went into my Nova Lands review on my account and then proceeded to type out gibberish into my post… and since they didn’t encounter the autosaving issue, they decided to just close the tab and not remove the gibberish they’ve typed in my post.

I had to go into the post myself after seeing this clip they sent me to realise that they’ve still left in the gibberish. This is griefing. What the fuck?

Anyhow, so, I linked to a WordPress post from 2020 where a user named erichat complains about “problems with autosave and preview“. Here, apparently, it was a plugin issue, according to the Support person that is taking care of my ticket. Erichat was on the business plan unlike me, so my issue doesn’t exist, apparently.

So, when I got back to my desk, I encountered this issue, just earlier, and started recording and venting into the microphone about how this issue is a WordPress issue and not a plugin issue. I don’t run plugins. I physically cannot add plugins on the personal plan. If it’s a plugin issue, then it has to do with Jetpack… and if it’s not, then it’s a WordPress issue.

Other people on different discords have run into similar issues and they use other browsers than me, ranging from Edge to Chrome. I use Firefox. It’s a WordPress issue.

So, essentially, I sent back a recording of my screen, showcasing how the issue was persisting for eight minutes, not saving the blog post, even though it says that it’s autosaving. I then showcased the band-aid fix (which is copy-pasting the post into a different draft in a new tab)… and what’s incredibly funny is that this issue happened AGAIN… in this new draft… in the same video. It only took me not even 15 minutes to essentially replicate this exact issue that the support person “couldn’t replicate”.

Well, of course, you cannot replicate it because you hardly tried. Can’t even bother to read my e-mail or to remove the gibberish you left in my post, so how could you possibly be successful in replicating a bug that has persisted through three years?

Anyway, I hope this gets fixed.

If you’ve experienced this bug yourself, please put your experience with it into the comments below. Please share what browsers you use, what plan you’re on and what devices you used when encountering this issue. Perhaps even share if you’re using any plugins or browser extensions.

I’d imagine that WordPress might be able to fix this issue… even if they haven’t fixed it in three years. Who knows? Maybe a fix comes with their 100-year plan.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.