Abandoned drafts keep rising from the dead about zulip HOT 4 OPEN

Thanks for the report! This is indeed a recent intentional change, as described in this Zulip update message:

When you start composing, the most recently edited draft for the conversation you are composing to now automatically appears in the compose box. You can always save a draft and start a new message using the send options menu next to the Send button. Learn more.

It's very possible there are improvements to be made in how it works.

I'm surprised about the particular issue you report with quote-and-reply, though. When I try to follow your instruction to reproduce accidentally mixing up an old draft with a new one, I'm not seeing the old draft appear.

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I think you're right - it is not happening for me following the exact instructions I gave. So I am not currently sure what was tripping me up - I definitely did have the experience a few times where I was replying to a quote and found some old draft text that wasn't meant to be there, but I'm now not sure exactly how to reproduce it.

Then I guess all I want to say is that as it is, I don't think this is a good change. It could be useful occasionally, but the rest of the time it just presents me with a problem I have to work around. If there was an easy one-click way to dismiss the old draft it wouldn't be so bad, but I would still honestly prefer it not to happen at all.

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Are you hoping to save the old draft for later, or do you want to get rid of it altogether? If you don't need it at all, deleting the text in your compose box will clear it out.

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Often I want to keep it. I use Zulip for maths, and it can take a while to get everything right before I send it. Often I do end up abandoning drafts entirely, but I don't want to explicitly delete them because I do sometimes come back to them. (Speaking of which, I sort of wish drafts wouldn't be auto-deleted either, but that's a separate issue.)

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