Since I just went thru this and didn't find any code that easily solved my problems to stop text typed in a form from being lost, thought I'd share this.
For HTML changes, all I did to the original form on WebmasterWorld was set the textarea to id="post" and add onsubmit="noWarn()" to the form, that's it.
Here's the javascript that names it work, the bind function is jQuery that goes inside the document ready.
var theform=1;
function noWarn() {
theform=0;
};
$(window).bind('beforeunload', function(e){
var count=$("#post").val().length;
if(count&&theform) return true;
else e=null;
});
Basically if anyone clicks any submit buttons or causes the form to be submitted, noWarn() gets called and disables the warning variable. Then the beforeunload routine counts the data in the textarea "post" and if both are > 0 it means there's text in the form and submit was not called, it's some other click on the page.
May not work for all your situations, but for WebmasterWorld some of the other off-the-shelf code I tried didn't work for whatever reason and this was so simple it couldn't fail.
Hope this helps someone!
