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| scmrak |
Posted: Sep 17 '08, 12:45 pm (Updated: Sep 17 '08, 1:24 pm) |
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Reviews written: 1363 Member since: Sep 27 '00
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: scmrak Practice - and practice on junk in which you have no investment time-wise. Y'all are tearing your hair out because you're so worried that your review won't look perfect - if you don't care whether the output looks perfect, then you'll feel a heckuva lot freer to experiment.
Quote: divad23 This is a rather poor excuse for us to just accept the way the system is now. That's not an "excuse to just accept the way the system is now," that's a suggestion for learning how to use the system the way it is now. Remember learning? It's what happens when we open our minds.
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| rcjones |
Posted: Sep 17 '08, 8:36 pm |
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Reviews written: 4 Member since: Nov 26 '05
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
I just wanted to thank jurgrace for the very helpful tip about linking.
I do appreciate the help. :)
RC
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| jurgrace |
Posted: Sep 17 '08, 9:22 pm (Updated: Sep 17 '08, 9:23 pm) |
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Reviews written: 418 Member since: Nov 26 '07
 in Kids & Family |
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: rcjones I just wanted to thank jurgrace for the very helpful tip about linking.
I do appreciate the help. :)
RC
You're welcome. Glad someone found my advice useful. :)
Grace
Edited to change 'your' to 'you're' |
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| divad23 |
Posted: Sep 18 '08, 12:19 pm (Updated: Sep 18 '08, 12:44 pm) |
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Reviews written: 570 Member since: Aug 21 '00
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: scmrak That's not an "excuse to just accept the way the system is now," that's a suggestion for learning how to use the system the way it is now. Remember learning? It's what happens when we open our minds.
Smn hs rmvd ll f th vwls frm my kybrd. Lt's s f can "lrn" hw t typ chrnt sntncs wtht thm. hv n "pn mnd", s ths shld b fn nd dctnl!!!
(Or, if you prefer the non-sarcastic response, then here it is: I appreciate your idealism here, but your proposed solution is not one that can be practically implemented when one has the backlog of specifically formatted reviews that I do. I cannot even edit an old review and submit it unchanged at this point without getting numerous error notifications. This means that it's going to take several minutes just to fix a typo that I might notice while reading an old review. "Oh, great, I typed 'your' instead of 'you're' in that review I wrote a few months back; now I've gotta go back and clean up all of the auto-generated HTML just to cover up that one embarrassing error that would have taken 2 seconds to fix before." I appreciate that there may be certain opportunities to expand my feeble closed mind, but this is not one of them. There's a difference between opening your mind and just driving it insane.) |
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| sleeper54 |
Posted: Sep 18 '08, 4:06 pm |
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Reviews written: 496 Member since: Feb 24 '01
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: divad23 --snip--
This means that it's going to take several minutes just to fix a typo that I might notice while reading an old review. "Oh, great, I typed 'your' instead of 'you're' in that review I wrote a few months back; now I've gotta go back and clean up all of the auto-generated HTML just to cover up that one embarrassing error that would have taken 2 seconds to fix before."
--snip--
I got a crazy idea. Really, listen to this before you go off on it...
How about ... stay with me here. How about you just leave that 'your' alone..??
No, no, no. I know what you are saying: That is crazy sleeper..!! It is wrong, I gotta fix it..!!
Well, normally I would agree with you: Go in, clean that little bugger up and be done with it..!!
But obviously now, for you, it aint that easy.
So just let it be. Save your energy and time and frustrations ...and yes 'learning time' for new reviews. Or for older reviews with drastic mistakes that really need fixing. Sorta like a 'triage' for your reviews. Believe me, I am sure peeps are not laughing at your old, "embarrassing" typos and/or minor errors.
Hey, call me nuts if you want. Just a thought.
...tom...
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| divad23 |
Posted: Sep 22 '08, 6:24 pm |
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Reviews written: 570 Member since: Aug 21 '00
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: sleeper54 How about ... stay with me here. How about you just leave that 'your' alone..??
...
So just let it be. Save your energy and time and frustrations ...and yes 'learning time' for new reviews. Or for older reviews with drastic mistakes that really need fixing. Sorta like a 'triage' for your reviews. Believe me, I am sure peeps are not laughing at your old, "embarrassing" typos and/or minor errors.
You know, I really don't appreciate how folks keep belittling my grievances with the system. That seems to be the way of things at Epinions these days - "Shoot, that upgrade didn't work. Oh, well, we can just tell folks how to work around it and I'm sure they'll understand."
Sure, it's nice to know temporary workarounds for annoying bugs like this. Or to just leave things be for now if you know they'll get it fixed in short order. I'm not saying that isn't useful information. (Though there's no guarantee of the latter that I've been able to see as of yet.)
In the grand scheme of things, I really don't care that much about whether somebody sees one of my typos or what they think about it. But let's say there was a severe error. It would still be much harder to fix than it was before. The severity of the error is immaterial. Let's say nothing was "wrong" with my review at all, but I wanted to go back and add some new information, because the singer passed away or was arrested or something since I wrote the review, or because I realized that my opinion on the product changed, etc. There are a myriad of reasons why I might want to change my review. Because I had the freedom to do this before, I expect - silly me! - that I will have just as much freedom to do this now without a bunch of extra hassle.
It's an issue of Epinions maintaining a good relationship with the users who provide its content. The general consensus I seem to be getting here is that a lot of the users don't care and want me to stop making noise about the problem... this gives Epinions the impression that we don't really mind all that much that they had something very useful for us going and then they completely screwed it up. I can be understanding when newly implemented features don't work. I can be understanding when it takes a while to get a new feature implemented that the community wants. But when something existing stops functioning, and I get told by other users to just live with it, that strikes me as a self-defeatist attitude. Just because a workaround exists does not mean that I should be satisfied with it.
Let's say your state's DOT is retrofitting a bridge, and they make a mistake that causes all but one lane of the bridge to collapse. The one lane is still usable, and they station workers there with those little "Stop/Slow" signs to make sure only one direction of traffic is going through at a time, which causes massive traffic delays. This is the best they can do until they get the bridge fixed. I get that. But now let's say they don't indicate any definite plans to fix the bridge that they destroyed, and when I get up in arms about this, fellow motorists tell me, "Just take this detour that we found; it only takes you two hours out of the way." OK, good to know, but that doesn't mean I don't have the right to be upset about the bridge not being fixed. |
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| ladyconsumer |
Posted: Sep 22 '08, 7:10 pm |
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Reviews written: 634 Member since: Jul 11 '05
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Hi David,
I don't think Tom meant to belittle - I think he was trying to offer some helpful advice.
That being said, I have gone back and updated several of my old reviews, with no problem at all. My old links still work. So do my old formats. (However I don't usually bold or italicize multiple lines at a time). Still, I'd like to understand why some people have problems when going back to fix old reviews, and others don't. Can you tell me what browser you're using?
Mona |
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| sleeper54 |
Posted: Sep 22 '08, 8:24 pm |
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Reviews written: 496 Member since: Feb 24 '01
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: ladyconsumer Hi David,
I don't think Tom meant to belittle - I think he was trying to offer some helpful advice.
--snip--
Mona
What Mona said.
This thread is replete with offers of help, with helpful posts about relatively simple work-arounds, with links to offsite visual examples of exactly what is meant when told to do something.
It was not, is not, my thought to squelch any voice that wants to make observations about the editor. Go for it. Not sure how that helps get a review published or helps one become more familiar with how to effectively use the new editor.
But hey, whatever works.
...tom...
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| scmrak |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 7:19 am (Updated: Sep 23 '08, 7:30 am) |
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Reviews written: 1363 Member since: Sep 27 '00
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: ladyconsumer Still, I'd like to understand why some people have problems when going back to fix old reviews, and others don't. AFAIK, there are only two things that cause problems when updating.
The first is the bug that gives David fits (tag pairs that the executable erroneously finds "open"). I know the bug has that one high on their priority list. The second the prohibition of html in titles. Many, many, many members have used italics and bolding in their titles and when you update a review that uses one or the other, it gets "kicked back" with an unacceptable html code error (or similar wording). Problem being that most members are used to searching through the body of the text to find that "unacceptable" html code, but it's not there!
The key is that, if the error is in the title, the error message is RED AND ABOVE THE TITLE. If the error is in the body of the review, the error message is black and below the title.
Betcha... just betcha that this is pretty common...
-30-
rex
ETA: I spoke too soon: I forgot about all of the extra lines the cussed thing produces. To fix that, just go into the html editor and blow away every last one of those paragraph tags (<p> </p>:) and then put the spacing into the editor window the way you want it.
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| jps246 |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 7:20 am |
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Reviews written: 848 Member since: Jan 25 '01
in Outdoor Gear, Sporting Goods |
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RE: pinned information?
As was pointed out over in this thread, there was talk about either pinning this thread, or producing a new, closed & pinned thread that pulled out the important information in this thread on the new WYSIWYG editor. It seems folks are still searching for information (as the earlier thread indicates) so I think it would still be helpful to have something pinned on this board.
Jeff |
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| jps246 |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 7:21 am |
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Reviews written: 848 Member since: Jan 25 '01
in Outdoor Gear, Sporting Goods |
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: scmrak The second the prohibition of html in titles. Many, many, many members have used italics and bolding in their titles
Guilty party here, but I've been taking it out as I've been updating reviews.
Jeff
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| ladyconsumer |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 7:32 am |
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Reviews written: 634 Member since: Jul 11 '05
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: scmrak AFAIK, there are only two things that cause problems when updating.
The first is the bug that gives David fits (tag pairs that the executable erroneously finds "open"). I know the bug has that one high on their priority list. The second the prohibition of html in titles. Many, many, many members have used italics and bolding in their titles and when you update a review that uses one or the other, it gets "kicked back" with an unacceptable html code error (or similar wording). Problem being that most members are used to searching through the body of the text to find that "unacceptable" html code, but it's not there!
The key is that, if the error is in the title, the error message is RED AND ABOVE THE TITLE. If the error is in the body of the review, the error message is black and below the title.
Betcha... just betcha that this is pretty common...
-30-
rex
Ah yes - the titles! I forgot about that one, because I hardly ever used html in my titles.
I asked the mods to pin the helpful posts no fewer than 5 different times (including privately in email). I can't understand the (obvious) reluctance to do so. It's bad enough that there are still so many issues with the editor, but they won't give us an easy way to help people!!
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| jps246 |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 7:36 am (Updated: Sep 23 '08, 7:42 am) |
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Reviews written: 848 Member since: Jan 25 '01
in Outdoor Gear, Sporting Goods |
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RE: pinning information/thread?
Quote: ladyconsumer I asked the mods to pin the helpful posts no fewer than 5 different times (including privately in email). I can't understand the (obvious) reluctance to do so. It's bad enough that there are still so many issues with the editor, but they won't give us an easy way to help people!!
Quote: jps246 As was pointed out over in this thread, there was talk about either pinning this thread, or producing a new, closed & pinned thread that pulled out the important information in this thread on the new WYSIWYG editor. It seems folks are still searching for information (as the earlier thread indicates) so I think it would still be helpful to have something pinned on this board.
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| pvreditor |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 9:55 am (Updated: Sep 23 '08, 1:09 pm) |
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Reviews written: 405 Member since: May 31 '02
in Cars, Home & Garden, Musical Equipment |
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: ladyconsumer Ah yes - the titles! I forgot about that one, because I hardly ever used html in my titles.
I asked the mods to pin the helpful posts no fewer than 5 different times (including privately in email). I can't understand the (obvious) reluctance to do so. It's bad enough that there are still so many issues with the editor, but they won't give us an easy way to help people!!
I'm not sure that pinning a thread with lots and lots of pages is the way to help -- that's a cluster-bomb of info to wade through. However, if someone is willing to distill out the facts and solutions as we know them, that's something worth pinning. If someone is willing to do this, either:
1. Post it as a new thread and I will pin-and-lock it; or
2. E-mail it to me and I will post it as a new thread and pin-and-lock it.
We really do want it to be easily found and understood. If anyone can think of a better way to do that in this case, let's discuss it and arrive at an acceptable solution.
Thanks!!
--Bob (a moderator) |
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| divad23 |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 12:06 pm |
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Reviews written: 570 Member since: Aug 21 '00
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: ladyconsumer I don't think Tom meant to belittle - I think he was trying to offer some helpful advice.
I'm sure he has the best of intentions. My point is that it's frustrating to be told "just deal with it and work around it" as if to imply that the problem isn't worth complaining to the management about. I get that there are several workarounds, and I will do my best to live with those for the time being.
Quote: ladyconsumer That being said, I have gone back and updated several of my old reviews, with no problem at all. My old links still work. So do my old formats. (However I don't usually bold or italicize multiple lines at a time). Still, I'd like to understand why some people have problems when going back to fix old reviews, and others don't. Can you tell me what browser you're using?
I'm using Firefox, but as far as I can tell there's no difference in the HTML that gets generated using different browsers. You likely aren't having problems because of exactly what you said - you don't have multiple lines of bold or italicized text in a row. You have no line breaks inside of a <b> or <i> tag. Remember that the old system was pseudo-HTML and it put in the <br/> tags for you wherever you put in a carriage return. Strict HTML actually just interprets carriage returns as a single space - so it wouldn't even break to the next line without a <br/> tag.
Now, if you're using the HTML editor, you see all of those line breaks along with your other tags, and if you're using the WYSIWYG, you don't see any tags at all. This is actually far more logical from an HTML programmer's perspective, so good on them for showing us either straight HTML code or no code at all.
But this creates a problem for me, because I submitted old reviews with carriage returns in between multiple lines of bold and italicized text. The new system's validation method is not backwards compatible with what was considered valid before. So when I go back and edit, it generates modified code based on what I had submitted before, and the code that it generates is not compatible with the new system. This is the crux of my issue - that the system itself is converting my old content to a format that it will now not accept. That's like the government giving me a bunch of $2 bills for a tax refund a few years ago and then telling me a year later when I tried to spend some of them, "Oh, sorry. $2 bills aren't legal tender any more."
As for the error with bold and italics in titles, that's not such a big deal, I can take those out when I go back to edit an old review. But I still find it annoying that what was once allowed is no longer allowed. It shouldn't be hard to validate the title the same way it validates the body of the review. (Though bolding your title is rather pointless - it already displays in boldface anyway.) |
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| jps246 |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 1:25 pm |
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Reviews written: 848 Member since: Jan 25 '01
in Outdoor Gear, Sporting Goods |
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: divad23 I'm using Firefox, but as far as I can tell there's no difference in the HTML that gets generated using different browsers.
There's a known issue with posting to the editor through Firefox. I believe it was brought up earlier in this thread, but I'm not exactly sure where in the thread it was discussed.
I had problems posting with Firefox but went to using IE to post reviews and haven't had a problem since.
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| ladyconsumer |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 2:15 pm |
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Reviews written: 634 Member since: Jul 11 '05
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: pvreditor I'm not sure that pinning a thread with lots and lots of pages is the way to help -- that's a cluster-bomb of info to wade through. However, if someone is willing to distill out the facts and solutions as we know them, that's something worth pinning. If someone is willing to do this, either:
1. Post it as a new thread and I will pin-and-lock it; or
2. E-mail it to me and I will post it as a new thread and pin-and-lock it.
We really do want it to be easily found and understood. If anyone can think of a better way to do that in this case, let's discuss it and arrive at an acceptable solution.
Thanks!!
--Bob (a moderator)
You've got mail.
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| divad23 |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 6:23 pm |
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Reviews written: 570 Member since: Aug 21 '00
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: jps246 There's a known issue with posting to the editor through Firefox. I believe it was brought up earlier in this thread, but I'm not exactly sure where in the thread it was discussed.
Are you saying that doing it in IE will generate the correct HTML code for situation such as mine? If so, I still think the ideal is to get it working the same way in all currently supported browsers (Firefox, IE, Netscape, and Safari at the very least), but I'm fine with using IE for the time being.
Anyway, I put on my thinking cap and decided to write the missing bit of code cleanup for myself, so that I can just dump the generated HTML from any review I write into my script, and it parses it and creates HTML that the editor will consider "valid". Yeah, that took a little longer than it might take to just go and fix my HTML manually for one review, but it'll save me a lot of time in the long run - and since I did it in about 20 minutes, I think it illustrates how quickly a programmer could solve this. (I did it in ColdFusion since we have a CF server here at work, so obviously that wouldn't work on a PHP site, but I'm sure the logic would be pretty much the same in PHP - or a JavaScript could even be written to deal with it on the browser side of things. (I could probably translate it to JavaScript if I was better with the syntax in that language.)
The basic logic is really simple. It goes something like this:
- Find the first set of <b> and </b> tags
- Isolate the text between the start and end tags
- Replace all <br /> tags within that text block with </b><br /><b>
- Find the next set of <b> and </b> tags that occurs after the first one, and repeat the process until you reach the end
- Go back and do the same thing for <i> and </i> tags
That's pretty much it. Just to make my life easier, I threw in visual carriage returns after each <br />, and I could even set it up to remove erroneous end tags that don't have matching start tags or whatever if I really wanted to. it's an academic exercise, but I like that sort of challenge.
Proof that this is any easy fix for Epinions to make! QED. |
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| jump_chump |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 6:51 pm |
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Reviews written: 0 Member since: Oct 04 '05
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: divad23 Proof that this is any easy fix for Epinions to make! QED.
As I noted before, the wysiwig is open source. The bugs you are dealing with are in the open source application itself. If you'd like to fix the bugs, feel free to drop by the TinyMCE site and get coding!
Seriously, though, the wysiwig code is fairly complicated. It has to manage peculiarities from multiple browsers, operating systems, and input methods.
Hopefully, the next release of the editor code will make things easier for folks.
damon
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Epinions Engineer
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| sleeper54 |
Posted: Sep 23 '08, 7:03 pm |
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Reviews written: 496 Member since: Feb 24 '01
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RE: New WYSIWYG Text Editor Help Thread
Quote: jump_chump --snip--
If you'd like to fix the bugs, feel free to drop by the TinyMCE site and get coding!
--snip--
damon
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Epinions Engineer
Well done.
. . . ...:snickeringsmiliemoment:...
...tom...
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