Losing posts when Steemit goes into maintenance.

This is my experience on Steemit this morning and what I have learned from it. Hope this will help make Steem even better!

Today I went on the website to write a more text-based post about Mental Health. I worked on it for between an hour and an hour and a half. In this time Steemit has gone into maintenance. The message on the site later was along the lines of :

We are performing maintenance works. The website is in the read-only mode. Apologies for the inconvenience.

But I did not know it when I was writing the post, as I did not refresh the page. Obviously, the news came rushing when I pressed the Submit button. The message was there and the post was nowhere to be found.

The unpleasant feeling of me wasting an hour and a half of my life started growing almost immediately. And the fact that I did not have another hour to write it was also unsettling.

I tried refreshing the page, maybe I simply missed it! Nope, it’s not there! I went back to the editing section, maybe the draft is there! And a ‘no’ again! After an ‘I looked everywhere’ search for the post I’ve texted @allasyummyfood to share my pain. She reassured me, as she was positive that after the maintenance is complete the post will appear in the SubmitPost window. And that did not happen.

At this point, I have come to terms that my post has gone into non-void. However, I want this to be a learning experience for myself and for everyone. There are some options, which I would like to flag to make sure this does not happen again.

First one. Very straightforward. Write the posts in other text editors (Word, OpenOffice, Notepad, etc.) or at least make a backup copy before you post them. I probably have had a blackout for a moment, which is probably the reason why I didn't do it.

Second. I think it would be grand if Steemit would add an option to save posts as drafts during similar maintenance. I hope this is possible.

Third. A lot of games and other websites give users heads-up as to when the maintenance is going to be carried out. As lovely as Steemit is, it is still in beta mode. So carrying out technical works is something that will benefit everyone. My suggestion is, therefore, to let people know in advance that for this period Steemit will be read-only.

By the way, when it becomes such, it removes Submit a Story button. I think this is very helpful, but wasn’t the case for me.

Please let me know in comments if any of you had a similar issue, and if you have any other suggestions to this.

Thank you!
Irina