CKEditor

[Nils]

It has been a few weeks since I upgraded to IP.Board 3 and I have to say that the CKEditor is probably the most disappointing part of the upgrade. With pure text posts it is simply not necessary and with more complicated posts it screws up more than it helps. Pasting text into posts or setting up more complicated layouts (like nested lists) has become a huge pain in IP.Board 3 because of the strange issues introduced by CKEditor. Custom BBCode also has major isses - newlines are getting lost, buttons don't work properly. Every day I run into some new issue where CKEditor does not work as it's supposed to and I have to drop back into text-only mode to fix it. And sometimes my post looks completely fine in the editor, but then gets screwed up when I actually post it, which is even worse.

Since writing posts is obviously the main activity in any forum, this is a big problem. I have even had to move long posts over into a separate wiki because they kept getting screwed up.

Is there any chance we could get back the old text-only editor from 2.3.6? It may not have been that intuitive, but once you got the hang of BBCode it was perfectly fine and didn't have any of the issues we now have. My users have been complaining a lot about this, and I am afraid they will just post less and less in the long-term...

[TSP]

I'll have to agree. I've also reported numerous errors in the bug tracker, but seems that most of them they are appearantly not able to reproduce or weird behaviour is marked as WAI.

They'll promised before that they're working on reintroducing the bbcode-buttons in simple mode, but we've not heard any updates to that for some months (as far as I know). In my opinion, I will be highly disappointed if they do not reintroduce them in 3.4 at the latest. But a small feature update like 3.3.4 for it, would be preferred.

In simple mode I also have problems though. Selecting text sometimes doesn't work. I can select all text with cmd/ctrl+a, but not just select some with my mouse cursor.

[Rimi]

I
don't

really
see
what

the
problem
is
with
nested
lists

it
seems

to
be
working
just
fine.

I

think


maybe

you're


just

doing
it
wrong?

As for pasting text, always use the paste as plain text option. Not that hard.

[Marius]

From what I've seen, vBulletin uses the same CKEditor, but their forums are not the problems present to the IP.Board.
I refer in particular to the fact that their editor supports iPad and iPhone, instead here is not.
I do not figure out how they can?!

[Nils]

• I
• don't
  
  • really
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

[/list]

As for pasting text, always use the paste as plain text option. Not that hard.

I don't know what exactly the issue is, but after editing a post with nested lists from 2.3.6 the formatting got completely screwed up. Also, the fact that you can't press tab/shift-tab to indent/unindent list items is very annoying. For pasting text: Try to explain to your users why they have to click a separate button, paste the text there and then click OK every time they want to paste something. It's just ridiculously complicated, especially to new users who do not know about it. And if you need to paste several times per post, it takes forever.

[Rimi]

Well did you run the post rebuild tool? I'm not surprised you have issues with older posts, but really that's not a problem with the ckeditor at all. Its more of an upgrade issue. Furthermore, I prefer to see my tab button go straight to the submit button and get highly annoyed when it doesn't. Not everyone has a need for nested lists (heck I never even use lists) and really it just goes down to the fact that everyone is different.

It's not that hard to explain. Ckeditor is a rich text editor. If you paste formatted text into it then it will try to retain that formatting. If you're copying and pasting unformatted text (which is pretty much always) then you'll never have this issue. Furthermore, continuous pasting is not something I anticipate lots of people do. Additionally, I've pasted stuff before and I really like how it retains hyperlinks. Overall, I would say thar ckeditor is annoying and I prefer to see my bbcode tags but that's because I'm a coder type person. Really for everyday use ckeditor works just fine. When you try to get really advanced with it then it starts to fritz out a little, but not in most cases.

[Nils]

Of course I rebuilt the posts, that is not the problem.

And about the pasting - if you paste from any website, which my users are doing frequently, chances are you are picking up their formatting. Which is almost never what you want. I keep having to tell people to use the paste-as-text or the eraser, but it makes the whole process so complicated that it is really annoying to write posts that contain multiple pasted words.

The fact is, this editor has multiple bugs that are making it very inconvenient to use and they are not getting fixed. Whether this is because CKEditor isn't fixing them or IP.Board not fixing them I don't know, but that shouldn't matter to me or my users. All I see is that pretty much every post on my forums gets posted with screwed up formatting first that the author or me then has to edit.

[bfarber]

As this topic has already been posted and responded to (multiple times), I don't really see the need for an additional topic on the same subject. I recommend finding one of the existing topics (of which there are many) and responding to that.

BBCode buttons will not be introduced in a minor point release (we rarely, if ever, introduce new functionality in minor point releases). It is possible, but not promised, this will be available in 3.4.

Bugs should be reported to the tracker. Many many editor bugs have been fixed since the editor was introduced, and we will continue to fix bugs that are reported.

[Nils]

Doesn't the fact that this topic has been posted multiple times already tell you a lot? This is obviously something that a lot of people care about.

I do report bugs to the tracker, but the problem is usually not that these bugs aren't known - they are just not getting fixed, or not quickly enough.

For example, the aforementioned issues with custom bbcode - which breaks a lot of important functionality in my forums - will only be fixed in 3.3.3, so all I can tell my users is "it's a known bug, it should get fixed some time, don't know when". This is just not enough for something that has such an impact. I had to remove all custom bbcode buttons from my forums for now, just to prevent people from screwing up their posts.

Other things, like the complicated pasting as text and weird behavior with URLs will get marked as "Not a bug" even though it's obviously very unintuitive.

I was really hoping that things had improved since IP.Board 2.3.6, but this is definitely an area where the update has made things a lot worse.

[Pereira]

The editor was one of the reasons I had to convert to another software. I'm glad now that I didn't wait around to see if you guys would fix it because quite clearly nothing has been done to fix any of the big issues.

There's even a bug I reported almost eight months ago which still hasn't been fixed. Unbelievable.

[miraclesun]

So the 3 things that need to be changed on IPS within the next 12 months:
- IP.Chat
- Emoticon management
- The editor


teehee

<3

[The Old Man]

Don't get me started on Emoticon Management!