If I click "Save and continue" -- should it publish the post?
ETA
Yes it published it. And only afterwards the drop-down list with an option "Drafts for XiXiDu" appeared.
ETA #2
This is a bug, don't punish people with downvotes for publishing their unfinished drafts.
People don't expect their draft to be published when they click "Save and continue" if there is a "Submit" button.
This is a bug, how can you call it anything else?
If no one wants to take the time to fix "save and continue" so it does what it should, then perhaps someone could take the time to remove the "save and continue" button from discussion posts edit window. Then submit is actually listed as the only choice, which is rational since it is the only choice.
Yeah, that confused the hell out of me when I published my first discussion item, which I immediately deleted once I realized it had been published, unfinished, to the discussion section!
You seem to know about this site. I need help. I posted an article. It is in the draft section. It appears on my computer in the 'recent posts" list, but on no other computer. It is called "To Speak Veripoop." Any ideas? Thanks
Go into the editing screen for your article. In the dropdown menu labeled "Post To", select "LessWrong Discussion". (You don't seem to have enough karma to post to Main, but unless I misremember, 1 karma is enough for Discussion.) Then click "submit".
The about page says you need two. thre3e might want to introduce eirself on the Welcome page; that should earn em enough karma for a discussion post.
The real problem is that if you "Create new article" from the main section, you have all three options- LW main, LW discussion, and draft. If you "Create new article" from discussion, the only option (as you point out) is posting it to Discussion. Just fixing that should be sufficient to have people posting unfinished articles to drafts.
That's annoying, but it explains the recent rash of incomplete posts. I recommend creating posts in Microsoft Word and uploading them when they're done.
I tried this and the formatting came out all wrong. Does anyone know what font I should use if I want it to look normal?
Use a plain text editor (like notepad), or alternatively, use Word and then after you've pasted your text into the box, select all and then click the remove formatting button, 4th from the right. (I've never tried the second option but I think it would work.)
The lesswrong css setting for body font is "Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" (first match). Pasting from MS Word is a bad idea though, because Word will paste all kinds of weird HTML markup into the post for any but the most trivial of documents.
Open Office, Word etc are word processors - they're designed for formatting text, and so pretty much by definition they're going to include formatting markup. If you want to write plain text for elsewhere, use a text editor, like Notepad (if you're on Windows) or Vim, Emacs or Gedit (if you're on an operating system, rather than a virus-support program).
I agree with AndrewHickey that using a text editor is best.
If you are really averse to writing HTML by hand though, there is Amaya, which is a web editor/browser that should generate very clean HTML if you don't explicitly set style properties. I haven't used it for years though and can't easily install it on Linux, but anybody on Mac or Windows should be able to install it fairly easily.
The real problem is that if you "Create new article" from the main section, you have all three options- LW main, LW discussion, and draft. If you "Create new article" from discussion, the only option (as you point out) is posting it to Discussion. Just fixing that should be sufficient to have people posting unfinished articles to drafts.