Topic on Talk:Main Page

Turned off for most pages, but left turned on for Talk pages.

It appears to be impossible to get the Visual Editor to abide by the wiki's Style Guide -- it consistently strips out whitespace that we want left intact for readability purposes, and it alters existing crosslinks so that they are longer than they need to be. This makes it difficult to see what content has actually been changed in a page edit and which changes are things that the Visual Editor code decided to do without being told.

The moderation team spends a non-trivial amount of time fixing what the Visual Editor breaks - time that could be devoted to other tasks.

Thus, we propose to turn off the Visual Editor. (Assuming, of course, that Flow will let us do that on talk pages.)

@GentlemensDame883 @Haggishunter @HeneryVII @Ilikecomputers @Jlaw @Lequinni‎ @RivetVermin @Umbire the Phantom @Utini501 @Labster @Looney Toons @GethN7 @Robkelk @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak

We have, I suspect, incorrectly punished at least one user in the past for things that were actually the Visual Editor's fault, before we became aware that it did stupid shit. I don't like that. I don't like the Visual Editor, either. I vote yes on turning off the Visual Editor, burning it to the ground, and finding its author and shooting him. Or at least just the first of those three.

Aw man, I exclusively use Visual Editor because I always struggled with editing without it. I had no idea it messed things up, and if I've caused any issues because of it then I'm genuinely sorry for increasing you guys' workload. It's not going to be easy to adjust, but I'm willing to do it if it makes things go a lot smoother.

Don't worry. Whenever someone submits a page that was particularly mangled by the Visual Editor, we let them know and gently suggest using the Source Editor. If you've never gotten one of these messages, you've never caused us extra work. Or at least we never noticed that you had. <grin>

So uh... I just realized something embarrassing. Somehow, I got the Visual Editor and Source Editor mixed up and only just now realized it. I've exclusively been editing with Source because Visual was the one giving me problems and not the other way around, ha ha. Sorry for the confusion!

So yeah in that case, jettison the Visual Editor into space and don't look back!

Yep, I agree the visual editor is not fit for purpose and should be killed off for real. I stopped using it after one of those gentle suggestions and don’t miss it.

Arrivederci To Visual Editor is my take, I support this. Flow will work in source mode, it does have fallback coding for that, so that won't be an issue.

Note, we can, with a minor backend change, restrict it to talk pages only:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor#Changing_active_namespaces

Oh, I like that. I don't mind it on talk pages -- it's not like we have pre-existing content there we don't want munged.

I agree too with turning off the Visual editor. It's cumbersome on desktop and almost unusable on mobile.

Source editor is like old.reddit.com -- the only official interface that doesn't feel like you're fighting the program.

Just philosophically, this seems to be one of those goals for programmers who want to make things look exactly as they do on the page to attract more "unsophisticated" users. It makes things look slick. Nearly all of these programmers use vim or emacs. And they somehow don't realize that everyone else wants the best tool for the job too, not something that looks pretty. And like, the hours I've spent fighting MS Word to get it to what you want it to do.

TL;DR: this is an Agree . Might change my mind if I see a contrary opinion, though.

I straight up run a custom userscript that deletes the "edit" button, leaving only the source editor available. Of course I'll support turning the visual editor off.

Well. All four of the active mods are in favor of shutting it off (no surprise, we've been discussing this among ourselves for quite a while), and so far everyone else is also in agreement. We've certainly exceeded our standard threshold for determining consensus (three more votes for one option than for the other), but this is such a big change that I suspect we're going to wait until more folks weigh in.

Agreed on waiting. The proposal has only been up for 20 hours as I post this; let's at least give it a full day.

In favour, get rid

It's less of a big change, and more of a minor change that could make people angry for changing their workflow.

If you're interested in finding out people who are actually using VE, well, Special:Tags has a way for you to do so. Check out how sparse Recent Changes is when limited to Visual Edits.

I am in favor of this proposal. Every time that I used Visual Editor was a major pain, and I will not miss it.

Hi, I got invited here by Looney Toons because I seem to be one of the few tropers that uses it. I just used it because I thought it was more easier than editing the source. Aside from me getting whitespace when I create pages, I never knew Visual Editor was this problematic.

Invited by Looney Toons, I would like to agree to turn it off. I have used the Visual Editor, which is more convenient than the Source Editor. However, if it is causing a problem with pages, then it would be best to turn it off to ensure more stability.

I wouldn't mind not having Visual Editor! Although the WYSIWYG aspect is nice, there's still Preview mode!

So far, we have thirteen tropers (including all four active mods and three tropers who use Visual Editor) in favor of turning off Visual Editor -- two with a caveat that we keep it for Talk pages -- and nobody against.

Leaving this discussion open while checking whether we have rights to change the $wgVisualEditorAvailableNamespaces setting.

I am okay with turning off the Visual Editor. I prefer working in Wiki Code, anyways.

Robkelk, what effect would this proposal have on those that use the VisualEditor's source editor (i.e., not visual editor mode and sometimes referred to as the 2010 wikitext editor)? I can see disabling the visual editor mode, but disabling VE's source editor is going to be problematic.

Not an issue. Disabling the VE mode will result in us falling back to source mode editing only via the stock MW code version, no loss of function is to be expected aside from the VE specific mode (non-source version) being turned off by removal of Visual Editor.

I use source editor so no opinion on Visual Editor mode.

Was it me who broke something? :O I know I was using VE previously.

Looks like I'm iceskating uphill, though, way things are going. Shall abstain.

Well, we definitely let this run for more than one day. (Mind you, some Internet High Drama intervened.)

I've submitted Miraheze Phabricator request T11156 for this change.

Per their advice, I have disabled VE in the main namespace (where all trope/work pages are). Turned out to be the only namespace needing it, left VE for all talk pages since it does no harm on those.

Great news. I've gone ahead and put a note about that in the SiteNotice.

Great!

Um, guys? I'm still seeing both "Edit" and "Edit Source" at the top of pages in the Main namespace, and I've confirmed "Edit" opens the visual editor still. The damned thing isn't dead yet.

Strange, I don't see it, it should be off for the "Main" namespace. Left on the talk pages for the Main namespace, but I can confirm it's off in the settings. Try flushing all cookies and cache and log in again.

You're right, that's what's going on. I was on a machine that I hadn't refreshed yet.