Thank you for raising this.

This problem has been seen before, but I'm not closing this as a duplicate because the problem was previously fixed so this may be a regression or a new problem. It was previously raised as "Remember last post edit in process" not clearing automatically.

It may also be related to the same problem with answers rather than questions, which has been raised several times:

• Saved text not cleared when posted
• Draft not discarded after posting an answer

These link to various other similar problems. It seems this problem has also been previously fixed but is now happening again.

trichoplax‭ The problem was never fixed. There may have been some attempts to address it. That may have reduced the frequency, but it never stopped happening. I think people mostly stopped reporting it.

I am pretty sure the problem is not fully fixed yet (as the one who implemented the other mitigations). If anything, the issue is more noticeable now that we don't block post submission until the draft is deleted via a client-side request. The reason for this issue is a race condition when the autosave reaches the server after the post is successfully submitted. We'll get to it in time, it's a prioritized bug, but, you know, our dev resources are limited, so it might take some time. As a workaround, you can click the big red bin button in the post editor to discard that phantom draft completely

Olin Lathrop‭ to clarify, yes the more recent reports have not yet been fixed, since the problem starting occuring again over the last few years. The one that was fixed was the problem specifically for questions rather than answers, "Remember last post edit in process" not clearing automatically, which was marked as "status-completed" 4 years ago.

Admittedly I don't know if that fix worked at the time and has stopped working, or never worked.

trichoplax‭ to add to what you mentioned, that fix still works, the problem is that it only ensures that the draft is guaranteed to be cleared upon post submission. And since the draft can end up being saved after the submission is handled, we sometimes end up with these "phantom" drafts.

The main irritating thing is that the zombie draft turns up after "Ask new question", so I ended up posting a copy of an already existing question (if in doubt, losing the active question is worse than having a copy).

It should be easy to cancel the effect by clearing the input array after the "Ask new question".

That would indeed fix the problem you describe, but at the cost of losing drafts that haven't yet been posted. If I'm part way through drafting a question and my computer crashes, I can later press "Ask new question" and continue with my draft. I wouldn't want to lose that ability.

trichoplax‭ so there is a flaw in the design: "Ask new question" and "Edit/resume last question" (posted or not) are different things but on the same button.

I see the work is not as easy as I hoped for.

The button could potentially be changed to say "Continue draft" when there is a draft question present, but that would still have the same problem of sometimes showing a draft that has already been posted.

There doesn't seem a benefit to having 2 separate buttons ("Ask Question" and "Continue Draft") unless multiple drafts are supported, otherwise pressing "Ask Question" will lose a previous draft even if it hasn't been posted yet. The bug raised here needs to be fixed regardless of whether multiple drafts are supported, so I see multiple drafts as a separate feature that could be requested in a separate Meta question if someone wants to.

trichoplax‭ it looks like it needs some time for discussion to figure out what should happen.