Best you can do is copy the description to your clipboard before clicking the save button. Our site is offline and the database is not available during our maintenance, there is no way to save it.
There may be a way for us to detect it's during maintenance and provide some type of warning, but I'm not sure. And we move the times around slightly so I'd have to see if it's something we can do because of that. I'd rather a few people that don't read lose their listings than a whole lot of people get an incorrect warning that their listing might not save.
Really though it's a small problem. Only people that start creating a listing before the server goes offline, then click save after it's offline have a problem. Everyone else can't even start writing a new description because the server is offline. Most of the 10 threads are about even having the maintenance time at all, or the time we do it at, or the day of the week. No matter what we do we'll never make everyone happy, short of not having it at all.
The main thing to remember is to read our flashing boxes at the top of the page. We put them there because they are important. Maybe we can put them next to the save button before maintenance, but honestly that's going to annoy a heck of a lot of people that know to read them compared to a few that don't. I generally err on the side of simplicity when it comes to decisions like this. I don't want to clutter up the site for everyone because of a few.
Here's the reason I'm up at this crazy hour:
That was from a few hours after being born, he's 5 weeks now. Which I can barely believe. It seems more like 5 days. Time flies when you're not getting a lot of sleep.