Autosave needs a “Turn Off” feature NOW. The problem is, the content of costumes containing text sometimes deletes itself without warning. And immediately after, the project saves itself, making the costiume irretrevable. Boom. Gone. Forever. You might have spent DAYS on that costume, and then it's gone forever. It could strike at any time, on any costume containing text.

Autosave shouldn't be ever-present if this terrible plague haunts Scratch 2.0! Please fix it, ST! Both of these! EDIT: Bug fixed.

So many Scratchers detest autosave and want an option of turning it off.
This is very, very important, so please don't overlook, ST!

EDIT: Okay, I don't HATE autosave, but I wouldn't use it if I had the option. The title grabs attention to the topic by making me look like a hater, then when you read the post it makes sense. I'm not actually AGAINST autosave, I just would rather not use it.

EDIT 2: The bug mentioned above is fixed. Thanks, ST! But I still want to be able to turn it off…

EDIT 3: Some ideas to IMPROVE autosave, so I'm not just whining about how you can't turn it off:
Make it only autosave x number of minutes AFTER LAST EDIT. That way it doesn't autosave while I'm editing a costume for more than x minutes. Whenever that happens, it always glitches. It's also annoying when it saves in the middle of taking apart scripts.

EDIT 4: Newer topic, better for discussing the contents of EDIT 3.

Bump, bump, bump! This is urgent AND important!

Agreed.

it should ask if you want to save it in my opinion.

Failord wrote:

Autosave needs a “Turn Off” feature NOW. The problem is, the content of costumes containing text sometimes deletes itself without warning. And immediately after, the project saves itself, making the costiume irretrevable. Boom. Gone. Forever. You might have spent DAYS on that costume, and then it's gone forever. It could strike at any time, on any costume containing text.

I'm sorry to hear that you are having issues - but please don't shout and jump to conclusions. Is the problem really with Auto-save or is it more the costume bug that is giving you grief?

Have you tried the Undo feature to see if that can restore your missing costume? It's a good feature and it's worked for me with other bugs that have caused the costume to wander off to parts unknown.

Please tell me more about this glitch that makes the costume disappear in the first place…can you give me a set of steps to do to make it happen?

ST is reviewing this and related options.

Note for now: just in case it helps in some instances: there's the Revert feature on the File menu which reverts to the previous version that was opened. (I realize that may not have helped in the example you mentioned, but just in case others haven't noticed it. )

Failord wrote:

The problem is, the content of costumes containing text sometimes deletes itself without warning. And immediately after, the project saves itself, making the costiume irretrevable.

Ouch! That sounds like a bad bug; I'll make sure it's high priority to fix it.

Assuming that bug were fixed and that there were no other bugs like it, would people still be against autosave? After all, autosave can sometimes prevent you from losing work. It's really the combination of autosave and this other bug that's causing the current problem. If you'd still want to be able to turn off autosave in a bug-free Scratch (ha!), can you explain why?

In some cases, it might help to use the “Revert” command. as Natalie suggests. This command undoes all changes back the point that you first loaded the project page. It's a bit like quitting from Scratch 1.4 without saving your changes. And if you get your project to point where you like what you've got and want to be sure you can revert to that point, you can (a) make sure it's saved (click “Save now” if necessary), then (b) use the browser “reload page” button to reload the project. After that, if you revert, it will restore your project to the point where you reloaded the page.

@Paddle2See- It strikes at random, as I like to say. Just make a project with a whole lot of costumes containing Vector text to see.

@natalie- I think autosave is a good idea, but only if you can turn it off. What I want is if you try to leave the window and your project is unsaved, then it asks if you want to save it like in 1.4.

@johnm- Thanks for the prioritizing! Even if it was a bug-free 2.0, I still want this option available because sometimes I don't want autosave at all. Most of the time, actually. Then again, I don't REALLY hate it, just when I'm making a project and a glitch like this attacks or when it changes the thumbnail of my project on me.

Thanks for listening!

I think autosave should be a backup copy. So, autosave saves it as a new project ( {autosaved}).
Then, if you exit without manually saving, it asks if you want to restore the autosaved copy.

Autosave is very useful for younger Scratch users – especially since they are using Scratch online. Enabling by default is good and having a way to turn it off would appease the more experienced users.

sci_test wrote:

I think autosave should be a backup copy. So, autosave saves it as a new project ( {autosaved}).
Then, if you exit without manually saving, it asks if you want to restore the autosaved copy.

Instead of flooding mystuff with all the copies how about each project has it's own sublist of reversions?
Picture a list showing the different versions, i would also recomend turning the auto save increment to 10 minutes for the sake of not having to many saves on st servers.

BUMP! This is very important!

I also agree

I agree, It should be on by default, but there should be a way to turn it off. In account settings maybe?

clearywalsh wrote:

I agree, It should be on by default, but there should be a way to turn it off. In account settings maybe?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Yeah, I'd agree that autosave can be annoying at times. Four things, in particular:

1) When you have no connection - as mentioned above by Tbtemplex97;

2) When you haven't really made any changes at all, you're just looking through something within a project (e.g. just “see inside” an old project, then switch from script to costume view - boom, your project is saved - and it now tells everyone it was last updated just now, when nothing has really changed);

3) Autosave kicks in immediately on the very first change after you “see inside”. This doesn't make sense, especially for established projects that you're only tweaking in some way, since it's hard to imagine a case where the very first thing you drag/move/change/etc. won't be followed by some other change very soon after;

4) Autosave happens while in the middle of making changes, rather than sensing that you're still doing something, which can be a bit annoying if you know you'll want to save manually again in a few seconds anyway. straight after the change you're currently making (and autosave fired up as you're dragging something, for example, and before you've even dropped it!)


Here are some possible suggestions, then…

1) Don't autosave after the first change, but only after a certain time (from the first change) or ‘amount’ of change.

2) Be a bit less strict about what constitutes a ‘change’ in some cases - switching from script to costume view isn't a change! (Conversely, there are some changes that are *not* noticed and probably should be, e.g. changing text in a comment, or arguments in a custom block…)

3) Don't autosave (so readily) in the middle of changes currently being made (e.g. dragging things around, or while there are dialog boxes open like change variable name/add message/edit custom block). Instead, only autosave during a few seconds of inactivity after changes.

4) When connection is lost, don't try to autosave quite so often.

I agree, too. I think DadOfMrLog said all. Possible additions could be settings like turn aturo save on/off and change the time after autosave saves.
And i think it shouldn't save if the project is running.

I agree with DadofMrLog. Also, sometimes I just like to play around with a project and maybe change a few scripts but I don't want to auto save the project. Other times I just create a new project to test things but saving isn't something I want to do.

Failord wrote:

I. HATE. AUTOSAVE.

YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE.

BoltBait wrote:

Failord wrote:

I. HATE. AUTOSAVE.

YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE.

Yes, that's why I listed you! And Wes64. I'll update that list…