the delphic expanse

I went into the archive to upload the latest chapter of one of my stories this evening, and encountered a bug:

With tinyMCE turned on, I could not click inside of the text box to paste my text. No cursor, nothing. I turned off tinyMCE, and I could then click and paste. It was odd, because I've never had problems before. Then it hit me: I upgraded my browser to Firefox 11.0 this morning. I downgraded to 10.0.2, and had no problem.

Just went to check this out myself and yeah, same thing. Guess I'll have to downgrade too. Unfortunate, I was hoping the update would fix some other problems I've been having.

We may need to look for a new for the archive,one that was developed more recently, or see if there's any new updates to the eFiction software. IE9 has been having the same problems, and I started having that problem when leaving comments from my Android phone when I got a new one (and therefore an updated browser with it, presumably). Generally unchecking the tinymce box will help if you don't want to downgrade.

It looks like e-fiction needs to update their use of TinyMCE.

The little editor that you can turn on and off inside of efiction (and lots of other online stuff like forums and blogs) is actually a separate program from the archive itself. Essentially it's a program-within-a-program. It looks like efiction is using an old version of TinyMCE that's not compatible with Internet Explorer. IMHO, it would be better if they'd switch entirely to another, more modern, editor, like CKEditor but a simple update of TinyMCE might solve the problems.

ADMINS: We can switch the editor/version out ourselves. It'd make updating the archive, whenever a new version of that comes out, a little tricky, but the process is nothing that's uncommon in professional settings. I can walk one of the admins through doing it whenever you feel like tackling it. Let me know in advance, and I'll setup an environment where you can do/test it safely.

This is probably a stupid question (wouldn't be the first time), but is there an easy way to make the default for the TinyMCE editor "off" rather than "on" if a lot of people are having trouble with it? It hasn't been a problem for me beyond understanding how it works (like with any program), but I use an old version of IE thanks to the proprietary platforms my employers use.

There is probably a way to turn it off. It'll be next weekend before I have time to really check into anything -- I'll be busy as my symposium presentation is coming up and I have three lit classes to keep up with. We didn't really worry about it before because only a handful of people were having trouble, and it's easy enough to use a different browser or just uncheck a box.

EntAllat--what if we just swapped it out for a newer version of tinymce? Would that make future eFiction updates less problematic or no?

Aquarius wrote:There is probably a way to turn it off. It'll be next weekend before I have time to really check into anything -- I'll be busy as my symposium presentation is coming up and I have three lit classes to keep up with. We didn't really worry about it before because only a handful of people were having trouble, and it's easy enough to use a different browser or just uncheck a box.

That would be the easiest thing to do.

Aquarius wrote:EntAllat--what if we just swapped it out for a newer version of tinymce? Would that make future eFiction updates less problematic or no?

That's what I meant by tricky. Whether it's a different version of the same program or different editor entirely, there's a couple of things you'll have to keep in mind next time when updating the archive software (whenever they put a new one out). It's not too big a deal though, really. There'll just be a couple of extra steps that might not be included in whatever documentation efiction has.