Often newcomers to Joomla will not know that they have to press "Save" or "Close" to properly exit an article (& some other things). They'll press the back button usually, which obviously leaves that article locked out to other users.
My question is not how to get that article checked back in for others to use, but, is there a way to prevent the back button from being used in the back-end?
I was thinking you know on some sites where you press 'back' and a JavaScript popup lamely says "Plzzzzzz don't leave"? Except you could word it like "Please either Save or Close your work so others can open this article" or similar.
But, the back button popup should only go off at places where the content is locked like this, not other times.
Is this sort of thing possible? It'd just be one less thing to explain to people.
I know in WordPress they at least have the courtesy of saying "Be careful there's another user editing this document" or something similar -- but, they do allow more than one user editing a page, which is quite another topic.

Welcome to the MJUG forum!

First of all, we all share your frustration with this bit of Joomla's behaviour. Many just handle it through user training.

The glib answer to your question is "No you can't change it because it would require a change to the Joomla Content component and that's a No-No if you want to ensure maintenance of version compatability". Furthermore as Joomla 1.5 is in its Autumn days, such a change would not be considered "through the proper channels".

Having said all that, I would I imagine that such a change would be quite technically possible.

I don't know whether such a change has been done or even considered for Joomla 1.6. May be worth looking.

Pete