@Grimhildr Does that mean you can replicate the issue in a fresh Firefox profile window / incognito window (whichever way you can create a window without add-ons)?

If not, then another possibility is that, since Firefox add-ons auto-update, an older add-on could be causing problems now that it wasn't in the past.

well i just actually disabled every addon i have, and i can't replicate the issue, so i'm gonna have to slowly enable and disable each addon (one at a time) and see which one(s?) causes it.

edit; so, it actually turns out it's an addon called "grammarly" causing it. that sucks.

@Grimhildr Thanks for digging into it.

Yeah, some of the one-star reviews for the add-on say that it'll make parts of dynamic forms disappear and stuff. Too bad.

@Grimhildr Thanks for digging into it.

Yeah, some of the one-star reviews for the add-on say that it'll make parts of dynamic forms disappear and stuff. Too bad.

that's annoying.

anyways, i just installed the desktop app, so i guess i can live without the browser extension.

@Mahz is there any way you could implement a justified text alignment? or even a [left][/left] text alignment? The first one because It looks cool, and the second one because if you center a hider, there's no way for its contents being left aligned, which is annoying tbh. I know a proper text editor is in your agenda but these QoL improvements will help a lot.
^{atleast It would help me xP}

Thanks for the hard work!

@Mahz is there any way you could implement a justified text alignment? or even a [left][/left] text alignment? The first one because It looks cool, and the second one because if you center a hider, there's no way for its contents being left aligned, which is annoying tbh. I know a proper text editor is in your agenda but these QoL improvements will help a lot.
^{atleast It would help me xP}

Thanks for the hard work!

expanding on this, i just want the text editor from roleplay gateway. lol.
_{im joking i love you mahz}

@Vec I've been holding off on editor features while experimenting with different editors, but I also don't want to stagnate the current editor in the "someday I'll replace it" limbo indefinitely. I'll have to draw the line soon and decide on what to do.

The editor is definitely the hardest aspect of the Guild.

I'm currently evaluating the possibility of building a WYSIWYG editor on top of the framework that Facebook built for its own products: draftjs.org

Cons:
- It's a WYSIWYG editor meaning that it can be frustrating if its rough edges are too rough. Ever create an element like a table or a list in an editor, yet no matter how many times you press ESC or Enter, you can't get out of it?
- Seems pretty hard to allow block elements (like Quotes and Hiders) to contain other block elements like more Quotes and Hiders, at least not without a real mastery of the Draft.js framework.
- Unknown mobile-friendliness.

Pros:
- Draft.js gives me control over the undo/redo stack. This is a classic forum-editor pain point where undo either doesn't work or it messes up your post more than it undoes anything.
- It's a WYSIWYG editor meaning that you don't write BBCode by hand. You can see what your post will look like without pressing "preview". The editor buttons are more powerful and it's better able to let you toggle a style on and off by selecting an element and clicking the button.
- I can integrate it with the Guild, like have a pop-up autocomplete box when you want to @Mention somebody, or allow you to click-and-drag an image into the post which uploads it to the Guild so that the image URL never breaks.

So far I have basic inline styles working in my dev environment:

- Colors
- Fonts
- The start of a @Mention autocomplete system

I also have some basic block elements working:

- Headers: H1, H2, H3
- Alignment: Left, Center, Right
- Lists: Unordered, Ordered

And these features work pretty well so far. You can undo/redo your changes. If you put your cursor on an orange H1 block, the orange button and the H1 button light up.

But so far, while experimenting with implementing Quote and Hider blocks, it seems like a challenge to allow blocks to contain other blocks since I'm still learning. I may have to just constrain block elements (Quotes, Hiders) such that they can only contain inline styles (colors, fonts, @Mentions, maybe headers, etc). At least at the start.

Ex: I reckon clicking the Quote button on somebody's post will have to strip out all of their block elements and only show text.

I hope to get a demo up and running online so yall can check it out an tell me if it seems worth pursuing.

@Mahz I don't know how hard this would be for you to add to that list, but: Can you make it so we don't have a huge amount of space between our header tags and the content below them? or, maybe giving us options to do so in the editor?

Thank you for all your hard work, we all really appreciate it <3

a WYSIWYG editor

pls no papa

edit;

@Mahz Personally I love the BB code aspect that we have and would hate to see that ability to fine tune a post disappear. I've used a few editors where they hide the BB code part and it ends up turning into a mess cause you can never quite adjust the design to how you want it.

I know it's controversial which is why it would just exist as an experiment on the side.

IMO almost anything is better than the Guild's current editor. Even something simple like choosing a color from the picker and then realizing you want a different color is infuriating. And there's no undo/redo stack.

Just tonight I've almost implemented more features in my experimental editor than the Guild's editor has.



And the features all work with undo/redo and text-highlighting. It's actually pleasant to use. You can even copy HTML into it.

Seems promising so far. But there's a lot more work involved before I can evaluate it thoroughly.

@Mahz That looks pretty cool.

Will there be an option to edit the underlying tags directly via plain text? Such a feature would serve at least two useful purposes: it would allow for precise control when necessary; it would allow for creating a post in an external editor (eg. a collaborative document writer) with formatting tags already in place so they do not have to be added afterwards.

P.S. Or is that what you mean by being able to copy HTML into it?

@Mahz I know not a lot of people will be super excited by this, especially since some want other features, but this makes me so happy. As someone who is a slut for aesthetics - and just a general lover of fonts - I am excite!

@BBeast Yeah, it seems relatively straightforward for me to transform WYSIWYG <-> HTML back and forth for when you want to fiddle with it.

some people will also be backwards and not desire to change from the BB Code system. No matter how bland it is currently as features go.

But new features that are actually useful (which an improved editor clearly is) is always welcome in our opinion. There's so many good feature ideas out there that you can't implement all the features people desire most of all right now. (far too much code meshing needed to do that)

@Altered Tundra I accidentally burned two hours window-shopping on fonts.google.com for cool fonts.

For instance, thought this was cool: fonts.google.com/specimen/Vollkorn

It'd be sweet to offer some 3rd party fonts but then give people the option to turn them off in the same way you can turn off signatures and avatars.

@Mahz That can happen. There are so many great fonts out there - both for writing and other uses.

And yeah, I imagine that would be a good route to go. Not everyone likes the different kinds of fonts(just as they don't like the bandwidth-raping signatures). How difficult would that be to code in(again asking for my curiosity )?

It is clearly flawed, as Elder Futhark is missing.

@Mahz
So now that I am home I have a bit of time to ask some curiosities.

The reason why I am a fan of the BB code is that it makes it amazingly easy to create a template for others to use. I can place markers for where players can choose colours, where text can go, and even design a preferred layout. The result ends up with a sense of uniformity and precision, in combination with transparency for when a mistake is made.

Examples below:

---

Link to RP example

---

The question I have is what can be added to help achieve this outcome?

You've also mentioned HTML. Do you think there should be any concerns for people attempting to code something malicious or running some script that may cause issues? I do know deviantART utilised a CSS tool for people's personal blogs, but I don't know if that's a very, very niche market.

@Ellri It was super easy to avoid autolinking in code-blocks in my experimental editor. Jealous?



@NuttsnBolts The experimental editor has a code representation. Here it is for the post in the screenshot right above this line:



You can basically copy it from one editor and load it into another, and the editor will populate itself with the post for editing. Kinda like copying the /raw version of a post (roleplayerguild.com/posts/4324490/raw) and pasting it into the Guild's current editor.

So that's possible off the bat. Though of course it'd be nicer if that was transformed into something you could actually edit by hand (if you had to) like HTML. The editor can generate HTML, but it takes a little work to tell it how to read it back into its own representation.

Ultimately it'd be cool if it was transformed into BBCode and then you could copy the BBCode representation back into an editor. But that would require more work. It's certainly possible in the long term.

There isn't much difference between BBCode and HTML, really. They are both intermediate representations of media made for human editing that get rendered into something prettier.

You're right that HTML can lead to more security accidents, and that's of course because BBCode doesn't run in the browser, so it's hard to accidentally skip the step where you transform it into a neutered subset of HTML before rendering it. Though that's the same step you have to do with HTML that comes from the user.

I'm not sure if I'm demystifying anything in this essay , but I'm trying to clarify why a WYSIWYG editor is not a limitation.

heh. That only explains why a WYSIWYG editor is more wanted.