One of my strongest recommendations for any writer has long been: write in a separate application that preferably automatically saves. Writing something long-form and losing it can be a terrible experience and writing into a text box on a web site is more prone to this than in most other situations. This is one of many reasons why I don't really advise writing scripts directly in scriptbin. (I also think you as a writer deserve better comforts and that they are usually better in other places.)

Recently, someone lost a script written over hours into scriptbin, and this made me reconsider a thing I have been thinking about many times before. So, if you go to your Edit profile page (from your page, clicking "Show other actions" and then clicking "Edit profile"), you can now turn on a beta version of Auto-save.

This has the following caveats:

• As mentioned, it is opt-in.
• As mentioned, it is beta.
• It will only be there for adding a completely new script. It is not integrated into Edit script, primarily because of the conflicts that I think will crop up, and how there's no good way to highlight the differences between them and the current version. Also because I judge the risk of losing a whole script to be the highest when writing a new script.
• Auto-saving happens to your local device/computer only. If you wrote something on your phone, it will only be able to be recalled on your phone.
• Due to saving only locally, if you browse with private browsing/incognito mode, there's a risk that it will not be allowed to save. If that is the case, a message is shown.
• The user interface to pick a version to restore is functional more than pleasant right now. But you are able to choose between versions, see the text restored into the text area as if you'd written it and see word counts and previews update. Restoring also means that the restore function goes away - this is a simplification. To get it back, go to the Add new script page again.
• Old auto-saves can't be removed manually right now. They are eventually aged out of the list, or removed when they pile up. This will likely be possible later on, but it isn't now.

The goal is not for scriptbin to become the perfect application for writing scripts in. The goal is to try to offer an extra safety net. I'm accepting feedback.