I don't mind a new editor for the forums, however the quote mechanism is terrible. You can't cut a quote up into pieces to comment on individual parts of it. Or edit a quoted post in order to highlight or emphasize parts.
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I still miss the one where you could actually edit the bbc or html code (can't remember which). That allowed people in the know to really make their posts look the way they want regardless of how bad the automatic garbage worked.
I agree that this new editor makes the forum less user-friendly.
I guess we should all write shorter posts so it's easier to quote them. 😂
Geez another forum change? Who doesn’t remember all the lost post and links to all the various char guides from the last forum change.. Let me guess this will screw up the daily resupply links. At the end of the day Who exactly is the forum intended for? Convince and knowledge base for users, or so some employee to pad their stats and make up fake engagement metrics for the publisher bosses?
Can we please discuss the fact that I'm now notified that there's a new post on a thread when I'm the one that made the post/reply? That should automatically count as "read."
The new comment editor is also using a text color that is way too light. It does not pass Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for contrast ratio.
It is utterly useless. Maybe we should habitually copy/paste and modify quotes that way?
How could anyone think this is an improvement?
Yeah, this works for a bit but loses the user name. (copy/paste text, then make it a "quote" block using the paragraph formatting buttons on the left.
That's the part that annoys me.
The changes are small enough it feels like it's not worth mentioning them in the first place. But it's also pretty clear this tiny editor change has made the forums objectively worse.
Thanks everyone here for the feedback. Let us see if we can get some answers about the new editor from Vanilla but if most users feel this way and their isn't a perfect solution, we will change this back to WYSIWYG.
Stay tuned!
The inability to do a partial quote of someone else's post is the main problem with the new UI. I actually like the minimalism in other respects.
The purpose of quoting is to draw attention to something someone else has said so you can respond to it. Quoting an entire message is one of the worst ways to do that, especially if the forum will then helpfully fold the long quoted message to hide part you're responding to.
On other forums I've used, fully quoting messages is often discouraged. With Discourse for instance, if you fully quote the last message in a thread in your reply, a bot will automatically edit your post to remove the quote and send you a message telling you off.
Can we skip the "troubleshoot the new editor" phase and go straight to the "undo the change that never should have been made in the first place" phase?
Every time I encounter something new since the editor was changed, it's been disappointing or frustrating. I've lost all of the shortcuts that are available everywhere else on the internet, so instead of intuitively applying knowledge I've collected from decades of being online, I'm stumbling around like a moron. I've only figured some things out by pure accident, and that's annoying as hell. Thankfully decades of experience online has also come with decades of wading through idiot developer's "intuitive" garbage, so I was capable of figuring it out anyways.
My most recent problem came from the editor trying to help me, and ultimately preventing me from accomplishing what I wanted to do. And since there are no normal editing buttons, I can't just do it myself.
The more I use this editor, the more it feels like someone was trying to reinvent the wheel. Which makes me want to beat them with a wheel until they choose another profession, because I will never ever ever ever ever benefit from this new editor enough to make up for the time I've wasted trying to learn how to use it, and learning where they've hidden features I already know how to use on the entire rest of the internet. Sure, we're only talking about time measured in minutes, here, but we could have just not switched editors, and I could have spent those minutes doing something infinitely more useful, like scratching my own ****.
The more I use this editor, the more it feels like someone was trying to reinvent the wheel. Which makes me want to beat them with a wheel until they choose another profession
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I'm glad to hear they're thinking about going back to the old system. For a minute my tinfoil hat came out, thinking maybe they were trying to drive away users so they could shut down the forum and no one would be that upset. 🤣
I do appreciate that I can post images much more easily now, if I want to. But that quote mechanic is absolutely awful.
More fun with the new editor...
Apparently signature edits are broken. If you have any characters in your signature you cannot save it. It will only save a blank signature. While trying to update mine every time I saved it told me I was 58 characters over, regardless of how many or few there were. I removed every character but 1 and still said I was 58 characters over the limit.
Great update 🙄
@IceIX @Brigby
Edit: Never mind. This apparently seems to be a one-time thing. When I first came in it had the old editor and I didn't notice, that's when it wouldn't save. After I changed my signature to blank, saved, and reloaded, it had the new editor and I was able to edit and save.