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After much careful consideration to come up with a good question title, and entering it into the title field of the new question form, I thought I'd try out the "Ask Wizard" to see what it does. It immediately deleted the title I'd entered, and it remained deleted even after turning the "Ask Wizard" switch back off again. (I had entered some tags as well, and these were also deleted.)

This is very unfriendly. Don't delete data already entered, under any circumstances. (And yes, this has definitely discouraged me from trying out new features on SE sites.)

(That this will probably apply to Ask Wizards on all other SE sites, but it appears I need to post this separately to the meta site specific to every SE site that uses the Ask Wizard. I will not be doing this, but don't take that as meaning I don't want it fixed everywhere rather than just on SO.)

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    well, fortunately, that toggle is going away soon and thus that method of losing your data will be gone. (the new wizard is going away) Commented Jul 7 at 15:29
  • I don't really think this is a bug, more an issue with user expectations, though I agree the user guidance in the UI could probably be more clear than whatever is there now. I would not expect unsaved form data to be preserved when I navigate to a new page, and then back. Perhaps just a prompt that asks the user 'unsaved data will be lost, are you sure you want to leave the page?' Commented Jul 7 at 15:34
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    I have gotten so used to websites randomly deleting my input that I Cmd+C my input just in case. Commented Jul 7 at 16:44
  • AFAIK, the Ask Wizard is only available in Stack Overflow. Commented Jul 7 at 16:48
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    Announcement mentioning the replacement of Ask Wizard -> One Ask Page to Rule Them All Commented Jul 7 at 16:52
  • @TylerH But changing the setting of a slider on a page is, at least to my mind, not at all like going to a new page. Consider e.g. the light/dark mode sliding button you sometimes see on web pages. Commented Jul 8 at 5:45
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    And that is on top of the UI actively fighting you to properly format your posts now. I tried to type a simple answer yesterday... a bit of explanation interspersed with a couple of code snippets I had readily prepared ahead of time. As templated as you can make it. Should take 3 minutes at most, took 15 minutes of strugglebussing. If the site then also starts to throw your content away, I can imagine that steam is coming out of the ears. Commented Jul 8 at 7:24
  • @cjs It's not just changing a slider, though, is it? it's a full page reload. It's a totally different form. I agree with you that it'd be better to preserve the content if possible, but that may not be possible given how 'on the rails' wizards tend to be vs open-format submission forms. I just don't think it quite qualifies as a bug, since it's working as intended/designed. Commented Jul 8 at 14:47
  • @TylerH It's certainly possible for moving a slider to trigger a full page reload if that's what the programmer wants it to do, but that's not what users normally expect to happen when using such an interface. ¶ "On the rails" or not, both the regular and the Wizard pages have a title input box that works exactly the same way. Regardless, if you're about to delete data, the least you could do is give a confirmation dialogue. Commented Jul 8 at 16:12
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    As for "working as intended," if it's intended to silently delete data, that's still a bug; it's just a bug in the specification rather than (or as well as) the implementation. Commented Jul 8 at 16:13
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    Making stuff disappear is evidently the "Wizard" part of the "Ask Wizard". Commented Jul 9 at 14:15

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