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Everything that is wrong with these forums

Nevill

Arcane
Joined
Jun 6, 2009
Messages
11,211
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Well, I promised. :)

This thread is intended as a place to put down all small and inconsequental gripes one has with the forums, their design, or their functions. It wil be updated as I find new things to bitch about.

Trigger warning. All entries here are petty. If it were something major, it probably would have deserved its own thread.

Still, it would be nice to see Taluntain comment on whether he sees them as a problem and if so, whether he intends to fix them one day.

Today's subject will be the rich text editor:
1) The backdround for rich text editor font options (size, font, save/delete draft) is transparent. Which leads to the options sometimes being unreadable when there already is a text typed in.
2015_05_09_103714.jpg
Can you see the name of the highlighted font between 'Book Antiqua' and 'Georgia'? Yeah, me neither. This 'feature' came with the latest Xenforo engine update, and it would be nice to see it reversed.

2) The text editor does not respect spaces between strings when you cut and past lines.
The upper half is the text that you type in normally, the lower one is what you get when you cut and paste it. With different fonts and font sizes this can lead to the text displaying on top of another text.

The text displays fine once posted, it's just the editor that has this problem.

3) The default font size does not match any of the options in the editor. It is bigger than 3 but smaller than 4.
That makes it difficult to return to normal font size once you use another, unless you wipe out all of the formatting. If possible, there should be a 'default font size' button.

Note that the text in quotes and spoilers does not have this problem, since it uses font size 3 as a default one.

The issue is made worse by the fact that the editor itself uses font size 3 as a default one, making it hard to notice size discrepancy until you post.
 
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Taluntain

Most Frabjous
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1) should be easy to fix, 2) various WYSIWYG editor issues have been there pretty much from the get go and fixing this would likely be more trouble than it's worth (using the Remove formatting button or switching to plain text fixes most of the problems). 3) is interesting, I'd just bump the default text size up to 4 or the closest equivalent in px since the text on most forums is too small for me to read comfortably so I'm always looking at everything in various levels of magnification anyway. I expect this is an issue for a lot more people using 1920+ resolutions, but since it's easily adjusted on the user side it's not something that anyone pays much attention to.
 

Nevill

Arcane
Joined
Jun 6, 2009
Messages
11,211
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
2) various WYSIWYG editor issues have been there pretty much from the get go and fixing this would likely be more trouble than it's worth (using the Remove formatting button or switching to plain text fixes most of the problems).
Thanks, I didn't know that. Switching to the plain text editor and back fixes the problem nicely. I guess the workaround is fine.

3) is interesting, I'd just bump the default text size up to 4 or the closest equivalent in px since the text on most forums is too small for me to read comfortably so I'm always looking at everything in various levels of magnification anyway. I expect this is an issue for a lot more people using 1920+ resolutions, but since it's easily adjusted on the user side it's not something that anyone pays much attention to.
This is mostly an issue when you use a lot of font formatting and can't switch back to the defaults without removing formatting, leading to uneven font sizes across the text.

Again, this is something you see mostly in Playground where people play with the fonts more often.

Also,
4) WYSIWYG 'remove formatting' button is not very reliable, as it sometimes does not do what it claims to do.

For example, if you select this passage with a triple click and click to remove formatting, it does not always revert the color to white.

The workaround is to manually select the text you need to apply the changes to.

5) You can choose color 'None' as a text color. Correct me if I am wrong, but what I suppose it should do (based on similar functionality built in other text editors) is revert the text color to the default one. Currently, though, it does absolutely nothing.
 

Nevill

Arcane
Joined
Jun 6, 2009
Messages
11,211
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Let's talk mobile devices.

6) Rich text editor does not function properly in a stock Android browser.
When you press a buttonto apply changes to a highlighted text, the selection drops. For example, on the screenshot above I have highlighted a 'This is an' string and pressed a quote button afterwards. Instead of putting the text in quotes, it resulted in what you see on a second screenshot.

7) Also, multi-quoting does not work there, either. Pressing a 'quote+/reply' button does nothing.

I know that this is solvable by installing Chrome and then it works fine, but I think there are a lot of people who only use stock browser. It would be nice to know if its going to be supported or not.

8) The add for mobile phones is disproportionally wide (actually, twice as wide as the forums themselves), making the forums scrollable to the right where there is a lot of free space. It is highly annoying for those of us who use gestures.

9) This is a very minor thing I have mentioned before in the 'bring back alerts' thread, but the buttons on the top when the page is loading do not correspond to the ones that are displayed when the page is fully loaded.
Only the 'Forums' button is visible when the page is loading, but four buttons are present on the fully loaded page. While in itself it is pretty innocuous, they are also reordered, so I sometimes find myself hitting 'Home' button when I wanted to press the 'Forums' one, but the page loaded before I hit it. Ideally, the order and the number of buttons should be the same regardless of whether the page is loaded or not.

Also, is there a point in having 'Home' button there at all, seeing how it is mirrored just a few inches below, and that hitting the site logo brings you right there. Instead of Home/Forums/Shoutbox/Members perhaps just Forums/Shoutbox/Members would be sufficient?
 

ghostdog

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2007
Messages
11,079
Also please fix the shrunken images in the spoiler tags, it has fucked up many LPs.
 

DarkUnderlord

Professional Throne Sitter
Staff Member
Joined
Jun 18, 2002
Messages
28,344
This isn't everything that is wrong with these forums. I was hopeful of a more comprehensive listing.
 

kazgar

Arcane
Joined
Apr 23, 2008
Messages
2,164
Location
Upside Down
Maybe it everything that is wrong with these forums, which means these forums are doing pretty good all in all.
 

Nevill

Arcane
Joined
Jun 6, 2009
Messages
11,211
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Are you sure? I think it would be easier to find out what is happening if we provide data from several devices and browsers, and the exact steps to recreate the problem.

In my experience, it works like this in the stock Android browser:
If you pre-point your finger exactly to the place where you want to paste new data and then do the long tap at the same location and paste, as demonstrated above, everything will work fine.

If you just do long lap at the required location, without pre-pointing the cursor, then though it will display the cursor at the required location when you are doing the pasting, it won't actually paste there:
I had my cursor at the end of the first paragraph and did a long tap elsewhere. Though the second screenshot in both cases is the same, the results differ.

Chrome does it correctly, in that you paste text whereever you do the long tap, regardless of where your cursor has been before.

Something is very borked with the stock browser and WYSIWYG. For example, let's select our new quote, and press 'Copy' to copy the text:
The cursor moves to some location that is five symbols (the length of the quote) away from the beginning. What does it mean for us, consideting the above bug with long tapping?

It means that if you long-tap on the 'Quote' now and choose 'Paste' - to paste the word over the same word which should produce no changes - it will replace the first five symbols in the message instead:

It gets even more bizarre from there. Let's say I wanted to replace some words in the second sentence.

It will instead replace the text fragment that is n symbols away from the beginning of the post, where n is the number of characters from the beginning of the paragraph where we are doing the long tap:
The 'Dex and the stock browser is a really weird combination.
 
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DarkUnderlord

Professional Throne Sitter
Staff Member
Joined
Jun 18, 2002
Messages
28,344
Yeah, for some reason the Minorin toolbar doesn't install in the new theme.
 

WhiteGuts

Arcane
Joined
May 3, 2013
Messages
2,382
I was hoping for some good old Infinitron bashing

Expected nothing and I'm still let down
 

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