Hacker News Reader

Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

The draft feature positively boggles my mind. The intention seems to be to collect all your drafts into one location. But that comes with the assumption people will have multiple drafts for ... chat channels? Do people really work that way?

If the actual intention is to remind you you have a half written message, seems some kind of indicator on the channel would suffice. Having my channel “disappear” on me is maddening.

View on HN

It did suffice! There used to be a pencil indicator next to the channel name in its usual spot, and it worked great. It maybe could have been more visually obvious, since leaving a draft in a chat so really is a rare phenomenon, but it was still massively preferable to the capricious ordering it does now.

It’s so simple. They could add the channel/DM to the Drafts list while also keeping it in its normal spot. I cringe with sympathetic embarrassment just thinking about how ridiculously obvious this is and how easy it would be to implement.

Hold on, if you have a dict like structure with the channels as keys then no, implementing that is not so easy.

I can't imagine anyone who has a job that doesn't consist mostly of talking to people doing that. But people with manager or sales-type jobs? I bet they could really love this feature. Start typing your message, discover you're missing info, task someone with finding that info. get back to the message whenever.

Still though, making it break the sort should really be a setting. Or even better, just show people twice if there's a draft open. Once in their normal place and once under the draft header.

> Or even better, just show people twice if there's a draft open.

Exactly. There's no rule that says user interfaces have to be in 3rd normal form. You could just leave a visible indicator next to the channel name, and have a separate page/tab with list of all unfinished messages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com