| | | |
| ssjakira1 |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 8:05 am |
|
|
Reviews written: 730 Member since: May 13 '03
|
|
RE: Does anyone test these things beforehand?
Quote: divad23 This is absolutely freaking unbelievable. It doesn't allow a line break within a bold or italics tag under ANY circumstances. And there's no way to revert back to the old editor in case someone encounters problems with the new one. Does anyone bother testing this sort of thing before unleashing it on the site at large, or does Epinions simply take delight in making it as difficult as possible for us to post reviews?
Yes, I know enough HTML to get in and circumvent the problem... but I use a lot of formatting in my reviews and this just bites me in the butt for doing it. It seems to me that if you create a WYSIWYG editor that creates HTML for you, then HTML it creates should actually be valid according to its own internal rules.
What a clusterfrak this site has turned out to be in recent years.
Yes. They tested it out. I emailed them and told them what issues I was having. The new editor, believe it or not, is actually worse than the tested version. |
| | | |
| pambo |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 8:09 am |
|
|
Reviews written: 442 Member since: Jan 08 '00
|
|
Doesn't Work
I'm still having problems. I forgot and pasted a Word review into the box; it rejected it with "html" that Microsoft Word itself produces if pasted. SO I deleted it all, repasted it all into Notepad, tried both pasting it and then using the little popup box. No luck.
Really, this is not helpful at all. I'm forcing myself now to just use Notepad, which doesn't give me a word count, and then pasting it in the old way.
I really hate this new tool because it simply doesn't work right.
|
| | | |
| pambo |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 8:11 am |
|
|
Reviews written: 442 Member since: Jan 08 '00
|
|
RE: Doesn't Work
Quote: pambo I'm still having problems. I forgot and pasted a Word review into the box; it rejected it with "html" that Microsoft Word itself produces if pasted. SO I deleted it all, repasted it all into Notepad, tried both pasting it and then using the little popup box. No luck.
Really, this is not helpful at all. I'm forcing myself now to just use Notepad, which doesn't give me a word count, and then pasting it in the old way.
I really hate this new tool because it simply doesn't work right.
Ah, I see Phungus may be having the same problem. MS Word creates a bunch of garbage that is visible as HTML when it is pasted into the regular posting box. I suspect that is the problem people are having. But right now, this problem is creating extra steps and flies directly against the plan to make things easier. |
| | | |
| jps246 |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 8:18 am (Updated: Sep 05 '08, 8:22 am) |
|
|
Reviews written: 846 Member since: Jan 25 '01
 in Outdoor Gear, Sporting Goods |
|
RE: Doesn't Work
Quote: pambo Ah, I see Phungus may be having the same problem. MS Word creates a bunch of garbage that is visible as HTML when it is pasted into the regular posting box. I suspect that is the problem people are having. But right now, this problem is creating extra steps and flies directly against the plan to make things easier.
You don't paste a word document directly into the editor. Use the Word Import button at the top of the editor, the box opens up and then paste your word document (with text actually bolded/italicized instead of coded) into the box and press 'insert' and then and it should work.
I've written 4 reviews now with Word and used the Word import feature and had no problems. I did have a few issues at first, which might have been due to Firefox (which is a known issue to Eps), but since then I've used Word and IE and haven't had a problem. |
| | | |
| jps246 |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 8:22 am (Updated: Sep 05 '08, 8:23 am) |
|
|
Reviews written: 846 Member since: Jan 25 '01
in Outdoor Gear, Sporting Goods |
|
RE: Does anyone test these things beforehand?
Quote: ssjakira1 Yes. They tested it out. I emailed them and told them what issues I was having. The new editor, believe it or not, is actually worse than the tested version.
In your experience.
However others have said that they like it. Eps staff has been reading and responding to postings in this thread. They have asked for files to be emailed to them and they have posted what they know are some issues. I don't think you can say that they aren't trying and that they aren't working on making the editor better.
Nothing is perfect when you roll it out (have you ever used a Microsoft product?) so I'm sure that they took into account the comments when the editor was being tested and made some changes. Did that make it better for everyone or perhaps create other issues? Probably, but over time it will get better and few bugs will crop up.
If people are having that much trouble, simply don't use any HTML and write your reviews in Notepad. That way they are as clean as can be and you won't have any errors because there isn't any code to get in the way.
|
| | | |
| ifif1938 |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 8:48 am (Updated: Sep 05 '08, 8:48 am) |
|
|
Reviews written: 799 Member since: Jan 17 '00
|
|
RE: Doesn't Work
Quote: pambo Ah, I see Phungus may be having the same problem. MS Word creates a bunch of garbage that is visible as HTML when it is pasted into the regular posting box. I suspect that is the problem people are having. But right now, this problem is creating extra steps and flies directly against the plan to make things easier.
I just posted a review from MSword. I've completely decided to forget about the big box and I copied and pasted it directly into the smaller one, when I hit submit the review was ok but I had to separate the paragraphs...I experiments with bolding one word in the text while in my MS word and it came out fine, then I highlighted another word while in the text body and hit bold being careful not to have any space at the end of the word... I also but italics on a few words the same way and they came out fine.
So all in all, I think, at least for me, the way to go is to use that small box and control V to add the review. So far so good this time...My thoughts are to keep it as simple as possible and to forget the old ways...but what do I know.
|
| | | |
| scmrak |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 8:55 am (Updated: Sep 05 '08, 9:25 am) |
|
|
Reviews written: 1355 Member since: Sep 27 '00
|
|
RE: Doesn't Work
Quote: pambo SO I deleted it all, repasted it all into Notepad, tried both pasting it and then using the little popup box. Don't paste a word document into Notepad. Open it as a word document, then save it as plain text. This will remove all formatting - it becomes what is known as a "plain ASCII file," which can be pasted into the editor window.
If you attempt to paste a something that is not a plain ASCII file into the editor window, you are going to have problems. However, the experience of many other members has shown that pasting text copied from a word processor into the word-processor input window is generally successful, except for the well-documented problems of
1) using Firefox 3 as a browser
2) attempting to span a carriage return with italicization or bolding.
Look here for pictorial instructions on how pasting from a word-processor is done.
NOTE: To those who are still having problems pasting documents from your word-processor: you are getting a separate window that pops up, with "Paste from Word" in the bar at the top, right? You have to have that window - if it doesn't appear, then you need to adjust your popup filter to allow popups from Epinions. Clicking the "paste from Word" button does not make the editor ready to accept a paste, you absolutely must get a second popup window or the process will be full of errors.
-30-
rex
|
| | | |
| ladyconsumer |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 9:48 am |
|
|
Reviews written: 627 Member since: Jul 11 '05
|
|
RE: Doesn't Work
Very nicely documented, Rex.
A few days ago I suggested a mod pin the most helpful posts on this subject. They've not done so. I still wish they would. So many users are coming here with questions, and so many people are giving GREAT advice. Why not make it easier to point newcomers to the most helpful answers?
|
| | | |
| sleeper54 |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 9:55 am |
|
|
Reviews written: 493 Member since: Feb 24 '01
|
|
RE: Doesn't Work
Quote: ladyconsumer Very nicely documented, Rex.
A few days ago I suggested a mod pin the most helpful posts on this subject. They've not done so. I still wish they would. So many users are coming here with questions, and so many people are giving GREAT advice. Why not make it easier to point newcomers to the most helpful answers?
I second.
Some of Rex's specific posts ( and thoughts published elsewhere ...hint, hint ) are excellent resources. As well as specific posts of others.
...tom...
. |
| | | |
| cmuir |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 10:48 am |
|
|
Reviews written: 512 Member since: Jan 31 '00
|
|
RE: Doesn't Work
Quote: scmrak Don't paste a word document into Notepad. Open it as a word document, then save it as plain text. This will remove all formatting - it becomes what is known as a "plain ASCII file," which can be pasted into the editor window.
rex
I don't seem to have that exact option. What I do have that looks similar is Text Only or Text Only With Line Breaks. Would one of those work??
Cindi |
| | | |
| gatorgirlie |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 11:28 am |
|
|
Reviews written: 248 Member since: Mar 07 '03
|
|
lol...
And to think... all I wanted to do was to come back and write a review on a website I purchased from recently.
I got so frustrated with the HTML editor that I just canceled the whole review and deleted it.
It's like Epinions is purposefully trying to keep me from wanting to return to review items. I just have to laugh.
Jen |
| | | |
| gamblin_man |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 11:36 am |
|
|
Reviews written: 389 Member since: Apr 08 '01
in Home & Garden |
|
RE: lol...
Quote: gatorgirlie And to think... all I wanted to do was to come back and write a review on a website I purchased from recently.
I got so frustrated with the HTML editor that I just canceled the whole review and deleted it.
It's like Epinions is purposefully trying to keep me from wanting to return to review items. I just have to laugh.
Jen
I just published a review, but not without some effort. I tried to carefully bold or italicize a header line, but could not do it without grabbing that blasted break character. I finally just edited the offending headers in the html editor and got it published. Hope the folks in Brisbane get this fixed soon.
Larry
|
| | | |
| sleeper54 |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 11:44 am |
|
|
Reviews written: 493 Member since: Feb 24 '01
|
|
RE: lol...
Quote: gatorgirlie And to think... all I wanted to do was to come back and write a review on a website I purchased from recently.
I got so frustrated with the HTML editor that I just canceled the whole review and deleted it.
It's like Epinions is purposefully trying to keep me from wanting to return to review items. I just have to laugh.
Jen
Rex, Mona, or ...tom... ( and others... ) would all be willing to help.
Just ask.
. . . ...:minism:...
...tom...
. |
| | | |
| scmrak |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 12:24 pm |
|
|
Reviews written: 1355 Member since: Sep 27 '00
|
|
RE: Doesn't Work
Quote: cmuir I don't seem to have that exact option. What I do have that looks similar is Text Only or Text Only With Line Breaks. Would one of those work?? Text Only. If you choose Text with Line Breaks, it puts in a carriage return every eighty characters (or at the nearest whitespace). You'd have to clean all of those up when you posted, since there
would be carriage returns in places where they don't
belong rather than letting the text
automatically
size to the window.
-30-
rex
|
| | | |
| scmrak |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 12:27 pm |
|
|
Reviews written: 1355 Member since: Sep 27 '00
|
|
RE: lol...
Quote: gamblin_man I just published a review, but not without some effort. I tried to carefully bold or italicize a header line, but could not do it without grabbing that blasted break character. I finally just edited the offending headers in the html editor and got it published. Hope the folks in Brisbane get this fixed soon.
Try this helpful hint, Larry: type an extra character at the end of your line. I use colons at the ends of my headers, and bold everything but the colon. It's turned out to be quite easy to do it that way.
-30-
rex
|
| | | |
| divad23 |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 12:33 pm (Updated: Sep 05 '08, 12:38 pm) |
|
|
Reviews written: 567 Member since: Aug 21 '00
|
|
RE: Does anyone test these things beforehand?
Quote: scmrak Well, David, all I've ever seen from you over the years besides reviews is vociferous complaints whenever something wasn't exactly the way you wanted it to be. Some of us are here trying to help people and making suggestions for how things could be improved.
Sorry, I just have very little patience for this sort of thing, because I do web design for a living, and if I were to go live with a new feature on a website that had such obvious, glaring errors on it that really should have been captured and eradicated during development, I'd fully expect a sharp reprimand for it. I can understand a really obscure error that happens sporadically not getting noticed in the testing phase - it's impossible to test absolutely every single scenario. But this, to me, seems like a really obvious and glaring error.
I can roll with the occasional inconvenience. There are lots of little buggy things in Epinions that I've learned to work around and/or tried to submit helpful bug reports through the official system, and that have been fixed gradually over the years. I don't mean to indicate that Epinions never does anything right.
But between this and the search engine woes that have plagued us for YEARS, this site has really been going down the toilet lately. I'm all for having an HTML editor, but I'd prefer doing HTML the hard way (by hand) and having it work, rather than having no choice but to use an HTML editor that gripes every time I try to put a line break between two lines of italicized text. I would rather keep something that wasn't broke rather than have it "fixed". The whole point of this newfangled editor was to make it easier for people to submit reviews, right?
Yes, I do realize that this can be worked around by closing I or B every time I want to break a line or a paragraph, then re-opening it if need be on the next line. But this takes a lot of time to go through and find all such instances in one of my reviews, ESPECIALLY when the HTML editor displays absolutely everything on a single continuous line.
Here are a number of proposed solutions, in an attempt to not be "part of the problem" any more:
1. Allow users to choose to revert back to the old editor if they want to. That should be a fairly painless thing to implement, so long as they kept the old code.
2. Make the HTML validator actually understand what valid HTML is!
3. Make the HTML editor only issue warnings when a user appears to have mismatched bold/italic tags. That way, if the user knows that they nested their tags correctly and it's just complaining about a line break tag between between two italic tags (which is syntactically valid HTML), they can go ahead and submit anyway, and just deal with the fact that their review displays funny if the HTML is actually wrong. Worst case scenario, the whole rest of the page will be bold and/or italicized after a point where they forgot to close a tag. Table tags and other HTML tags that affect the layout aren't allowed, so there's no way for any malicious HTML code to "break the page".
4. Make the HTML editor intelligent enough to actually display a carriage return after a BR tag, and two carriage returns after a P tag, for the sake of the user's sanity when editing their HTML. White space is ignored when HTML is rendered, but it is very difficult to read HTML code and find the points in one's review that need code cleanup when everything is on a single line.
There, is that helpful enough? |
| | | |
| gatorgirlie |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 12:43 pm |
|
|
Reviews written: 248 Member since: Mar 07 '03
|
|
RE: lol...
Quote: gamblin_man I just published a review, but not without some effort. I tried to carefully bold or italicize a header line, but could not do it without grabbing that blasted break character. I finally just edited the offending headers in the html editor and got it published. Hope the folks in Brisbane get this fixed soon.
Larry
Well, my problem was that I naively tried to just write a review instead of doing time-consuming research on how the review process now works.... lol.
I spent 15 minutes transfering between HTML and regular trying to spot my errors... To my knowledge, standard HTML will allow you to end bold after a line break. Actually, I just wrote an entire website and I'm pretty sure it allowed me to do that very thing.
I got frustrated and deleted it, then came here and read what people are writing. I had the process backwards, apparently. I see, now, what my mistake was but I'm certainly not going to go back and write a whole new review.
:-/
Jen |
| | | |
| dragonfire88 |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 12:46 pm |
|
|
Reviews written: 1170 Member since: Jul 20 '01
|
|
RE: What information we need
Quote: sleeper54 To summarize...
I think I got it all correct...
...tom...
.
Ok. That's what I was thinking needed to be done with that link. I just wanted to double check to make sure I was right.
Now I just had to take out most of your post to get this to go through because I was getting errors about having opening tags with no closing tags. Sheesh. |
| | | |
| dragonfire88 |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 12:49 pm |
|
|
Reviews written: 1170 Member since: Jul 20 '01
|
|
RE: What information we need
Quote: scmrak Open your list with your word processor and save it as an html file. That should turn all of your coded links into "live" links (underlined and in a contrasting color, like this). Then, whenever you want to add one of the links simply copy the live link from your page-o'-links and paste it into the editor window. You need do nothing further with it, since it's already a link. When you want to add to the list, you can right-click on the filename and choose "open with" to open it in a word-processor instead of a browser.
...tom... has been pointing this cut-n-paste technique out for a while, but it keeps getting overlooked...
-30-
rex
I did see his suggestion on that earlier. I just needed to read through it a few more times to fully understand.
I'll try that in the next few days. |
| | | |
| scmrak |
Posted: Sep 05 '08, 1:30 pm |
|
|
Reviews written: 1355 Member since: Sep 27 '00
|
|
RE: Does anyone test these things beforehand?
Quote: divad23 ...There, is that helpful enough? Helpful, indeed, and already mentioned by many people in the previous 250 or so posts (not blaming you for not slogging through them, merely pointing out that others share your pain and disgust). A few points:
In case you didn't know, the tool was created by a summer intern. Yes, it was ill-considered to implement it after s/he'd already left (a pox on interns who don't complete their projects until their last day on the job, BTW). Yes, it would've been a good idea to completely debug it before rolling it out. That gets us into spilt milk teritory, I guess.
Many people have asked for the ability to toggle between the old and new editors. It might - or might not - be on the drawing board. Perhaps after they've gotten the thing fixed. I think you can be certain, however, that they're never going to roll back to the old editor in toto.
The intercalated line break that is causing so much pain in bolding and italicization is a known bug, so it's not as if no one had reported it already. No, it shouldn't work that way. Yes, the workaround is a kludge - workarounds are always kludges, by definition. But is it really so bad? Depending on how long your set of lyrics is, it may take eight or ten extra seconds to italicize on a line-by-line basis (especially if there's punctuation on the ends of all or most lines). Think of it as a mechanism for forcing you to proofread one more time.
Your suggestion for "unclosed tag" warnings instead of errors is well-considered. I have no idea why they didn't do that in the first place - surely it would be better to have lots of reviews with huge blocks of italics or bold than peeved reviewers. Failure to correct the condition probably would correspond to content lacking in attention to detail, anyway...
Thank you for your input.
-30-
rex
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.