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I may be overlooking something here, but sometimes I have a question that I know will take a long time to properly write up (composing, gathering resources etc.).

So, wouldn't it be nice to have somewhere on the site that is private to each users account that you can write brief mental notes, possible answer notes or question titles in? You can then come back when you have more time and write really nice, detailed, not rushed, flushed out, carefully considered, well formatted (I could go on) questions!

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If you need to jot down something, draft a question or answer, there is the Mech.SE Questions Sandbox.

I would highly encourage you to use that.

The nice thing about chatrooms is that they can be a freestyle as you want and no one would care about it.

I should warn you that anything and everything you post in the chat rooms will be publicly viewable by anyone on the Internet.

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The whole idea of Stack Exchange is that of openness. Even the mods are told not to "talk behind other's backs" here. If they have something to say, they should say it. I doubt you'll get this feature installed due to this reason. We're all friends here, so that is the reason for the openness.

If you are looking for a place to write down your thoughts, open up a Word document or even just Note and write your stuff down. Call it up when you want to write it down or flesh something out. I have done this many times on some of my longer answers, if for no other reason to not lose something I'm in the middle of (though I have done that, too).

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  • Yes I thought there might be some reason that you can't write notes by design but I wasn't sure of that reason - openness. That makes sense I'll just continue to make note outside of SE instead.
    – Max Goodridge
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 8:42
  • Yes, I just use notepad and jam it up in there and post it later if I need to.
    – DucatiKiller
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 19:10
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There is an answer caching feature on the site.

If you start a question and don't post it and wander off, when you come back to answer your text should be in the answer box.

Don't know how long the text needs to be in the box before it's cached.

See this link.

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  • That's a really good point, I hadn't even thought of that! So technically they do already have this feature! Now that I think about it, it does say "draft saved" before I make a post.
    – Max Goodridge
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 23:00
  • The answer-caching isn't very reliable in my experience (switching between devices). I wouldn't bank on it
    – Zaid
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 20:59
  • agreed. It needs to sit for some min time (don't know what that metric is) before it works. I have come back to some very extensive saved verbiage quite a bit later though.
    – DucatiKiller
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 21:01

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