[bathtub365]

I don’t see anything in this issue that I’d characterize as

> The developers stating they had no intention of changing this for "security reasons" before closing the Github issue sealed the deal.

The issue is still open with no response from the developers that mentions security reasons.

[lucideer]

There have been many tickets opened (and closed) on this problem. Searching their issues for the keyword "offline" should bring up some of them. This one is just the latest.

[cloverich]

Its in issue in the sibling comment. The suggested work-around is to not sign in at all.

[lucideer]

For further context: I'm not sure if this has changed but at that time signing in seemed* to be required (there's some discussions in the ticket about confusion in the UI about this so in retrospect UX dark patterns were likely at play). However, while it may have been possible to make ad hoc requests without an account, it didn't seem to be possible to save request collections locally without sign in.

[a85]

That is incorrect. You can save requests inside Collections in the Scratchpad and send requests without an account.

[lucideer]

Not sure what I said that's incorrect?

The original issues were from 2015 & 2017 - Scratchpad was only added to docs in Jun 2021 (before that was an undocumented feature for likely under 2 years I would guess).

Also, on the suitability of Scratchpad as a workaround for this bug, as quoted from person who created the linked issue:

> and no, scratchpad is not a solution to this.

The same sentiment is echoed through many of the more recent closed issues created in Github on this topic.

Either way: my comment above was mainly about dark patterns, which makes the existence of a workaround (not matter how suitable) somewhat moot. Even if this issue gets fixed "properly", the attitude of their devs over this long a period of time has been more than enough to turn me off using their software.

[a85]

Scratchpad was specifically added as a feature to clearly allow people to use it Postman in an offline mode because otherwise people were confused about the distinction between an offline/online mode (Why is my content not showing up on Postman's web version for example). There are some features that just can't be developed with local storage as the only option.

An exceptionally large majority of users that give us feedback are pretty happy with the collaborative online features that we provide through Workspaces.

Unfortunately, a small but vocal minority is insistent that all those things be not developed because they have built their own workarounds through patterns from decades ago (CLIs, editors, repositories). I just don't agree with the sentiment that progress towards making lives easier for others should be stopped for a narrow viewpoint to be met. I also understand that it will lead to alternatives but so far almost everything that I have seen in the market has been a clone of our feature set - open source or closed source. I am happy to see people compete with new ideas.

[lucideer]

> There are some features that just can't be developed with local storage as the only option

This is disingenuous. Firstly, no-one is asking for this "as the only option"; they're asking for it as an (exclusive) option. Secondly, there are no features being asked for here that can't be developed with local storage as an option - in fact, the default is for local storage to be the only option. In most apps, the approach is to add sync as an extra, not as the required default.

Scratchpad seems a perfect representation of the developers' motivations actually: it's both a demonstration that the feature is possible but deliberately implemented as a non-default side-feature without integration with the app's main workflows, to discourage use. So the devs can give it as a "solution" while continuing to pervasively track the bulk of their userbase.