XF 2.1 Major editor complaints

adamgreenough

Well-known member
I have many users complaining about the post editor.
  • Cursor jumping to beginning when backspacing or deleting wrong text
  • iOS not keeping shift on when entering 2 line breaks and turning it on at seemingly random times (very annoying)
  • Entering 2 line breaks on list does not close the list as you’d expect or is totally inconsistent
  • Backspacing to first character on new line moves you up to the next line
  • Sometimes pressing enter on new line will select text randomly

I understand it is 3rd party but it is a core component of xenforo and if it can't be fixed then it should be changed

It is getting very frustrating. Is there any way to implement a more reliable editor via a add on?

I am trying to sing the praises of the traditional style forum but the most important feature is majorly letting me down and annoying my valuable users.
 
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I have a few users complaining about the same issue when using Google Chrome. I can't reproduce it myself, but they describe it exactly as the issue explained in this thread.
 
I believe it is an iphone browser only thing. I put some code in my Xenforo to toggle the editor to plain text mode if an iphone is detected, and that is working for us for now. (the equivalent of clicking the gear icon in the editor, which they can also do manually to toggle it)

Android folks are not seeing this behavior.

The editor is getting a COMPLETE overhaul in Xenforo 2.2 soon, and it will hopefully no longer be an issue.

There are multiple discussions about the iphone issue, and from one of them I got the advice to add this to PAGE CONTAINER (around line 640 in my case) I also changed it with a comment and removed it from being applied to Android and Smart TV guests; as the original code was applying to all.

Code:
    <xf:comment>
        ; Added 5/9/20 MPL to disable rich text editor by default for IOS devices that have bug in browser
        ;    Original line, before android exempted:
        ;   if(/Android|webOS|iPhone|iPad|iPod|Opera Mini/i.test(navigator.userAgent)) {
    </xf:comment>
    <script>  
        if(/iPhone|iPad|iPod|Opera Mini/i.test(navigator.userAgent)) {
            window.localStorage.setItem('xf_editorDisabled', '1');
        }
    </script>
 
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I believe it is an iphone browser only thing. I put some code in my Xenforo to toggle the editor to plain text mode if an iphone is detected, and that is working for us for now. (the equivalent of clicking the gear icon in the editor, which they can also do manually to toggle it)

Android folks are not seeing this behavior.

The editor is getting a COMPLETE overhaul in Xenforo 2.2 soon, and it will hopefully no longer be an issue.

There are multiple discussions about the iphone issue, and from one of them I got the advice to add this to PAGE CONTAINER (around line 640 in my case) I also changed it with a comment and removed it from being applied to Android guests; as the original code was applying to all.

Code:
    <xf:comment>
        ; Added 5/9/20 MPL to disable rich text editor by default for IOS devices that have bug in browser
        ;    Original line, before android exempted:
        ;   if(/Android|webOS|iPhone|iPad|iPod|Opera Mini/i.test(navigator.userAgent)) {
    </xf:comment>
    <script>  
        if(/iPhone|iPad|iPod|Opera Mini/i.test(navigator.userAgent)) {
            window.localStorage.setItem('xf_editorDisabled', '1');
        }
    </script>
Ha, yeah that is my code. 😄

Froala still seems to have these issues in iOS in their very latest version (demo on their frontpage), so I am not holding out too much hope.
 
Oh that was you. Thank you! It works like a champ :)

Yes I believe they are still staying with Froala, but a very different editor. Did you see the new video demo?

Do IOS people who use Chrome still have this issue, or is it limited to the default IOS browser?
 
Oh that was you. Thank you! It works like a champ :)

Yes I believe they are still staying with Froala, but a very different editor. Did you see the new video demo?

Do IOS people who use Chrome still have this issue, or is it limited to the default IOS browser?
No problem! Good shout on removing Android, was not sure how severely any issues affected them. I did have some complaining of at least minor issues but nothing like on iOS. I didn't see the demo! Do you know where I could find it?

All browsers on iOS/iPadOS use the same WebKit engine, even Chrome has to use Safari behind the scenes. Apple won't allow any other way so all suffer from the same issues.
 
All still present in this XenForo version of 2.2 as expected, unfortunately. I will still have to provide a gimped text only editor for my mobile users.

I am baffled that this is not more of an issue for people.

My absolute ‘favourite’ is a combination of these problems. I have to consciously remember to put the shift back on when starting a new paragraph otherwise I’ll do two new lines, type a letter, remember that shifts turned itself off, backspace it then another error removes both the first character and the new line and I have to do another new line that turns shift off again!

How is that an acceptable experience. It is easily reproducable now across many versions of iOS and this editor so can’t just be a few cases.

I’d be so happy if at least the shift on new line was fixed. The deleting of first character is almost always due to this and I can just hide list buttons on mobile.

It’s not possible to detect if shift is activated nor trigger it in JS so racking my brain for a fix.
 
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Is it possible to opt to use paragraphs for new lines instead of br @Chris D? This would solve it for me. I can just style paragraphs to have the appropriate margins.

Froala already handles paragraphs and breaks appropriately on hard/soft returns respectively.
I have submitted a case for switching to paragraphs here:
 
I have many users complaining about the post editor.
  • Cursor jumping to beginning when backspacing or deleting wrong text
  • iOS not keeping shift on when entering 2 line breaks and turning it on at seemingly random times (very annoying)
  • Entering 2 line breaks on list does not close the list as you’d expect or is totally inconsistent
  • Backspacing to first character on new line moves you up to the next line
  • Sometimes pressing enter on new line will select text randomly
We have rolled out some changes here today as a result of upstream fixes from Froala. To the best of my testing so far - as long as my comprehension of the issues was correct - these issues seem to be resolved in the version of the editor we are using here.

If you'd like to give it a test yourself and confirm either way that would be great.
 
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