Last modified: 2011-11-14 20:11:58 UTC
Created attachment 8644 [details] comparison of old and new toolbars Several buttons on the edit toolbar insert placeholder text when clicked. This placeholder text is often left in the articles. On en.wikipedia, one can search for "Bold text", "File:Example.jpg" and other such strings and find instances where this has happened. Many are clearly vandalism, but others appear to be legitimate edits save for this unwanted string. The conclusion is that users are clicking the toolbar buttons by accident, and not realizing that the placeholder text has been added to the page. Since the toolbar is flush with the top of the edit form, a slight misclick when trying to select text at the top of the form can click a toolbar button instead. When I first recognized this issue on en.wikipedia, I asked for the local CSS to be changed to add a gap between the toolbar itself and the edit form, to reduce the likelihood of accidentally clicking the buttons, which may have helped somewhat. When the new toolbar was introduced this change was lost. I suggest the same thing is done with the new toolbar, and it might as well be done by default in the extension itself rather than as customization on en.wikipedia only. I have attached screenshots of the old and new toolbars as displayed on en.wikipedia; note the gap below the old toolbar.
I have my doubts on this... recommend WONTFIX or INVALID.
By all means reject the suggestion if you don't agree with it, but I don't see how it's not a valid request.
Below I have included steps to reproduce the issue, in order to clarify exactly what the issue is. 1. Pick any page long enough to scroll the edit form. 2. Select "Edit". 3. Decide to edit the end of the page. Scroll down to the end of the edit form. Edit something. 4. Decide now to edit the top of the page. Scroll the edit form back up. 5. Go to click the first line of text at the top of the edit form. Miss by a couple of pixels. Hit the toolbar instead. 6. Recieve no feedback whatsoever that a script just inserted some text, because your cursor is still at the end of the page scrolled out of view. 7. As a relatively inexperienced user, assume nothing happened and you clicked empty space. 8. Click the first line of text, successfully this time. Edit some more. 9. Decide to save the page. Select "Save". 10. Hope someone comes along and fixes the broken formatting you inserted at the bottom of the page without realising it. I have also amended the description to reflect the issue rather than my proposed solution. Perhaps someone can come up with a better one.
(In reply to comment #3) > 6. Recieve no feedback whatsoever that a script just inserted some text, > because your cursor is still at the end of the page scrolled out of view. At some point in the distant past, we used to scroll the text box down to where the insertion happened. I guess this broke at some point.
(In reply to comment #4) > At some point in the distant past, we used to scroll the text box down to where > the insertion happened. I guess this broke at some point. Tested it in different browsers. * Firefox 4: works reliably * IE9: doesn't work at all * Chrome whatever-its-on-now: works very intermittently, maybe one time in 20 (if you spam the toolbar buttons enough times, eventually it scrolls). I still think avoiding mis-clicks altogether is preferable, though. With everything in Vector super-sized relative to Monobook, it's the only place where clicking is so fiddly.
