There will soon be a core facility for this: T75241

There is a genera; problem with “Saved X min. ago" labesl. To keep that statement true at any point of time, you need a ticking clock in UX. You see saved 4 second ago, you wait for 10 seconds,- now you should see Saved 14 seconds ago. Updating this at regular intervals is not trivial.

Google drive for example, does not show this timestamp

They just say: "All changes saved in Drive" and avoids this "clock display".

So @Pginer-WMF, please clarify what is the time intervals for updating this message and what is the cut of relative time to show nothing/actual time.

We also have a problem of constructing the relative time from moment.js and concatenating with "Saving " to create grammatically correct sentence - This is a problem only if we donot restrict the relative time stamp to say "minutes" alone.

I have the following proposal:

Always use minutes as time unit. No "seconds" or "hours". At every 1 minute update the label. And at every x minute autosave. x is always less than 60 and I think 10 mins autosave is reasonable - in case no autosave triggering event happened.

We can also optimize the save api call by checking if anything really changed or not in the translation.

Change 176896 had a related patch set uploaded (by Santhosh):
Save the draft translations automatically

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/176896

Patch-For-Review

Screenshot of the indicator from the above patch

@santhosh your approach sounds good to me.
The problem with "all changes saved" is that we are not planning to save as the user types (Google docs moves from "all changes saved" to "saving" as the user types a single character). In our case we plan to have a bigger latency to avoid excessive load so we cannot say either "all changes saved" or "saving" while the user is editing a paragraph we have not triggered saving for.

I think that using only minutes should be enough. Here are some additional considerations:

• Don't use "0 minutes ago", use "Saved just now" instead.
• If it takes more than 5 or 10 minutes, trigger auto-save. If there are changes the user would be happy to don't lose 10 minutes editing what may be a complex paragraph to translate. If there are no changes we can update the indicator ("Saved just now") anyway since the important thing is to communicate that changes won't be lost.

-To be extra safe we can have a special "Not saved for a while. Retrying..." when the counter goes beyond the limits we defined above (which may happen due to connection problems).

Change 176896 merged by jenkins-bot:
Save the draft translations automatically

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/176896