Strange behavior of the editor in the forum

Question

Jan 2019-1-7

11
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此问题的直接链接

https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/answers/438664-strange-behavior-of-the-editor-in-the-forum

评论： Image Analyst 2020-10-29

The editor in the forum is still driving me crazy. With the old version I could at least type my messages in an external editor, but now the text field is too smart to allow this.

When I type some code (Ctrl-E to enter the code style, then "for i = 1:10"), the editor is such smart, that it adds an "end" automatically. But I do not want such an "end", because my example is clear already without it. After this line, I press Enter and Ctrl-E again to leave the code style. Now I have to spend some time to get rid of the "end".

Sometimes the text field seems to loose the focus partially. I've tested this in Firefox only: While the typed characters appear in the text field, Firefox interpretes the keystrokes also and scrolls through the page exhaustively, such that I cannot see, what I type anymore. I type some characters blindly and scroll back to check, if it is correct. With the next keystroke the page is scrolled again. This is extremely annoying.

When I leave the code style, there are a certain number of spaces infront of the cursor. Trying to delete them let me exceed the first character frequently, such that I delete the code style before. Therefore I need to use "Pos 1" at first, then "Shift+End" to mark all spaces, "Delete" to remove them and then I can start typing from the first character.

It is hard to insert a link, but even worse to insert a string without formatting. Because I appreciate the correct spelling of names of persons, I copy&paste the names from the display by copy&paste. Unfortunately the editor is such smart, that it inserts a link automatically and I need a bunch of keystrokes to make it a standard text. I should append a move of this, because during the editing some parts of the string disappear intermediately and reappear magically, when a space is added.

This feels very weird. I have not seen such a crazy and unintuitive editor before. Typing answers in the forum increases my stress level, because the interface does not treat keyboard inputs like any other software.

What a pity, that the field for typing is not recognized as text field anymore, such that the auto-spell-correction of the browser does not work. I apologize for all of my typos.

There are many forums with working editors for text, links, code and citations. Markdown, BBCode etc. are established methods. Matlab Answers has problems with the interface for many years now. It is time to fix and simplify this until it works, instead of making it smarter and cooler.

Has this topic been diskussed in (sorry, I'm typing blind again, because of the mentioned effects of scrolling away... darn) forum already? Do others suffer from the same problems? Is the editor more intuitive in other browsers than Firefox? Does somebody use an external editor like XEmacs + macros successfully to create answers with copy&paste including links and images?

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Stephen23 2019-1-7

编辑：Stephen23 2019-1-7

Spllee chkceing deos nto wrko aynmroe... bt thius is no reaason ot apollogsie!

The fact the text cannot be copy-and-pasted as text (with markup) means sitting and painfully reinserting hyperlinks, formatting, etc.. Adding hyperlinks with my own text takes twenty times longer than simply typing <> used to. Sticky formatting... sometimes I manage to turn on some feature (e.g. monospace) but then it continues with no way to turn it off without resorting to selecting the text and clicking the pretty buttons (nice way to slow down a typist). The magical scrolling when the text is longer than the text box means that I cannot see where I am typing. The curser appearing twice makes me crosseyed and makes it hard to know which characters I am about to delete. The automatic code completion...

The irony is that this seems to have made not a single iota of difference to the people that I presume this fancy editor was aimed at: "irregular" users, to make it simpler for them to markup code, etc. Well, that does not seem to have happened, as the "irregular" users pay just as much attention to formatting as they did before. So the net effect has been less efficient "regular" users.

I would much prefer other improvements to Answers, such as the ability to convert answers to comments (without deleting them and making a new one in my name), something that would actually benefit all users of this forum.

Jan 2019-1-8

编辑：Jan 2019-1-16

@GT: To mention the correspondent I type "@" in my comments and copy&paste your name from the top of your message. Now I have "@GT" and the underlining is active until I disable it. When I type a backspace, I get "GT" and the @ vanishes magically. Now I mark this string and press the Underlining button, which let reappear the @ fortunately.

With your name "GT" it is easier to type it manually, but e.g. for "Govind Sankar Madhavan Pillai Ramachandran Nair" a simply "copy text only" would be a benefit.

The usability of editors is essential, because it is the human-machine-interface. The MathWorks is a powerful high tech company with a lot of high-skilled programmers and designers. It is really surprising, that they did decide for such a frustrating and obviously not seriously tested engine.

By the way, using the online example in the help pages suffer from equivalent problems. When I type a curly brace, the focus goes to the browser for some seconds and subsequent keystrokes as missinterpreted. This means, that I have to stop typing for 2 or 3 seconds to avoid a confusing chaos. The advantage of the smart auto-closing of parenthesis is lost.

Jan 2019-2-20

5 weeks later. I'm still extremely confused, if the page is scrolled away magically, when an answer is longer than the window.

How can such problems happen? I assume, the web-interface of the forum and the management has become too complex to be controlled efficiently. It is hard, that these serious problems have not been detected before rolling out the new interface. But that it take month to fix this problem seems to demonstrate, that the underlying concept is too complex to be handled efficiently.

I still miss the bare-metal editor of Matlab 5.3, which could be expanded by user-defined macros written in Matlab. I could do nearly everything by this smart method. In opposite to this, it is bewildering to dig in the Java class hierachy of the modern editor. We find a variety of undocumented features - I can e.g. redefine the background color behind ribbon on the top. But some simple features like keyboard macros are a mess. The Java basement let the complexity of the interface explode without a substantial benefit for the daily work.

Now the Live-editor and the answers forum start to grow together. But obviously this is a really complex job. The possibility to run the examples of the documentation directly in the browser is an extremely smart idea. But it works such creepy, that I'm feeling like an elephant in a match box: When I open the window, I have to wait for 10 seconds. Then anotehr 5 seconds, before I can edit the code. When I press a parenthesis or braces, the focus is moved to the toolbar and subsequent keystrokes are forwarded to the browser. So I have to wait for 2 or 3 seconds after ( or { before I go on with typing. The idea is excellent, but the implementation is extremly frustrating. If TMW really wants to include the feature of running code directly in the forum's interface, I'm really scared. It was impossible to implement a correct code formatting in the forum for many years, also the algorithms are established and the auto-indentation works since Matlab 4.1 (as far as I remember) perfectly in the editor.

In this forum the flawed interfaces have been replaced repeatedly by much more powerful flawed interfaces. I just want to type with an intuitive "what you see is what you get" feeling. A feature explosion, which causes bug fixes to take many months, looks like the managers have lost the overview.

I like to offer my spare time to support Matlab users. I'd be happy if I can simply type some answers. Mark down or BB code would be sufficient. I do not need a golden rocket with WhatsApp feeling to tell newcomers not to use eval.

Jan 2019-11-23

编辑：Jan 2019-11-23

@Image Analyst: Thanks for the advice. I've cleared the complete history and cache now and restarted the browser. The behavior remains the same: Pressing the button on top of the comment to copy a link or the button to insert a link in a message, greys out the complete page and nothing else happens. Pressing Esc or clicking anywhere in the page re-enables the page again. When I open an attached image, only the lower half is shown on the top of the window - the upper half is cropped.

For me the froum is not usable with Firefox. All other forums and webservices I use work relaibly with Firefox. Am I really forced to change my favorite browser only to participate in this forum?

I see, that the forum uses these services: mathworks.com (of course), adobedtm.com, ads-twitter.com, bing.com, demdex.net, doubleclick.net, everestjs.net, everesttech.net, facebook.net, google.com, googletagmanager.com, omtrdc.net, quantserve.com, s3.amazonaws.com.

Enabling/Disabling them by a script blocker does not change the problems. I'm not happy with this pile of tracking services.

I've reduced my activities in this forum in the last months, because I got too frustrated by the batlles with the web interface. I really like to help others solving Matlab problems. I really don't like to spend a lot of time in inventing tricks and work-arounds for standard actions like copy&paste a link to a comment, inserting a link in an answer or seeing pictures. When I type an asnwer and insert an "if a<b" in a code block, the forum adds an "end" or indents the code in the following code block, even if there is absolutely no relation. The forum's interface does not let me simply type, what I want, but is driven by an artificial dullness, which tries to be smarter than me. To make it worse, the really useful spellchecking service of my browser is disabled, which impedes me massively.

I sent a bunch of enhancement requests to TMW in the last 10 years. For me the usability of the forum got worse with each update and its quality does not support the valuable work of the contributors.

Image Analyst 2019-11-25

The only problem I have with Firefox is the scrolling bug (reply and then it scrolls the editing window to above the top of the screen). I demonstrated this in person at the Mathworks to Tushal (web developer) so he saw it but wasn't able to reproduce it on his computer so I have doubts it will be fixed.

Walter Roberson 2019-11-25

Datapoint:

Firefox for Mac (High Sierra):

Installed extensions: Ghostery, AdBlocker for Facebook, Privacy Badger, Blur, Adblock Plus, NoScript

The only error I am currently seeing is that occasionally I cannot edit something -- it just spins the wheel. This is a problem known to Mathworks which I believe they know the solution for.

There is also an occasional message about formatting being lost, which is also known to Mathworks and has to do with messages that were created on mobile browsers instead of desktop/

Firefox for Android:

Editing is a nuisance, as it is not possible to click at a point to move the cursor there. Instead, the cursor is always positioned at the bottom of the posting, and I have to use the arrow keys to move line by line until I get to the point I want to edit. Text cannot be selected, so I cannot reformat blocks of text as code.

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Answer 1

David 2019-1-8

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https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/answers/438664-strange-behavior-of-the-editor-in-the-forum#answer_355576

MathWorks community developer here: Thank you Jan for starting this thread, and all of you who've responded, for the feedback and active discussion about the update to the editor. We're actively listening to the community conversations and working on resolving many of the issues you point out ASAP.

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Rik 2019-3-28

This morning I notice a draft mode on mobile that seems to be much like the old editor. This seems to solve the keyboard issue at the very least.

Jan 2019-5-3

It still does not work for me (Firefox, Win7/64 and Win10/64): If an answer exceeds a certain size, it is scrolled out of view automatically. So after 4 month the interface for typing messages is still broken. This is very frustrating, because typing gets as confusing as possible - only an implicit ROT13 would be worse.

@MathWorks: Please fix the interface of the forum.

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Answer 2

Stephen23 2019-2-13

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https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/answers/438664-strange-behavior-of-the-editor-in-the-forum#answer_360800

Unfortunately the new editor does not work with Windows high-contrast mode, most of the toolbar buttons end up totally blank:

For those of us with more restricted sight, this is quite a hinderance.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13862/windows-use-high-contrast-mode

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Jan 2019-2-13

编辑：Jan 2019-6-17

I'm using the high contrast mode in Win 7 and Win 10. To see the editor in Matlab Answers, I use the Firefox extension "Dark Background and Light Text" wit the setting "Invert". Then the files in the FileExchange are displayed in white font on white background until I enable the "Default" behavior of this extension.

Jan 2019-9-6

Hi Stephen, I gave your answer 2 votes :-)

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Answer 3

Jan 2020-8-30

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https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/answers/438664-strange-behavior-of-the-editor-in-the-forum#answer_487139

1.5 years later. I tried it again.

I still cannot set a flag, delete an answer or insert an image or link. Whenever I try it, the complete content of the window is greyed out. I guess, that the button are hidden on top of the window, but there I cannot scroll the window. This happens with the current version of Firefox under Windows 10 on 3 different computers.

Sorry, I have editor powers but for me the interface is still not usable. I do not find an explanation in the FAQ of the forum, which mentions, that it cannot be used with Firefox. So I give up again.

What a pity. I'd be glad to share my knowledge about Matlab.

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Jan 2020-8-31

编辑：Jan 2020-8-31

@Walter: I'm using NoScript, but adobetm.com is allowed. Even if I deactivate all blockings, the behavior remains the same: When I click on the icon for setting a flag, deleting or adding a link, a small popup menu is displayed on top of the page, not on top of the window. So I can use these features as long as the page is scrolled to the top already. When I scroll a little bit down, the upper part of the appearing popup window is cropped already and I cannot scroll anymore in the scrollbar oder with the mouse wheel. Here an example, where the lower part of the window is still visible:

As soon as I scroll some further few lines to the bottom, the popup window is not accessible anymore. All I see is a greyed window and only pressing escape actives it again.

I've included the image using Vivaldi, where the popupmenu ist created relative to the top of the window, not relative to the page. This seems to be an easy and browser-depending problem, which should be fixable with small effort. But obviously my 3 computers are the only ones, which are concerned. It might be worth to mention, that I set the up independent from each other. NoScript runs in Vivaldi also without disturbing the view.

Unfortunately the code editor is too smart in other browsers also. Placing the menu bar on top of the section for typing is a bad idea also, because it reduces the usable area, although there is so much empty space in horizontal direction. In addition the menubar moves out of view, if I type a longer message.

NoScript reveals that participating in this forum share more data with external services than I like to. Why should I tell twitter, Google, amazon and facebook details about my activities in this forum?

Jan 2020-9-2

Thanks, David. While it works in Vivaldi, I tried to find the cause of the problem in Firefox again. It was not NoScript, but "Dark Background and Light Text" in "Invert" mode, which glues the popup windows incorrectly. No I try it with "Dark Reader" instead and it works.

David 2020-9-3

Thanks for posting what the issue was @Jan. I'm glad you were able to zero in on the cause.

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Answer 4

Jan 2019-6-7

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https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/answers/438664-strange-behavior-of-the-editor-in-the-forum#answer_378258

编辑：Jan 2019-6-7

5 months later:

Since about a week, at about every 5th or 8th time pressing Ctrl-E my Firefox decides to switch to the first tab instead of activating the code style. This slows down the typing severely, because I have many open tabs and have to search the one I edit in.

I cannot edit links in Firefox anymore: If I press the chain-icon, the contents of the window is grayed out completely, but nothing else happens. I can re-enable the window by pressing escape only. There was a similar problem in the FileExchange also.

In the last 8.5 years the interface of this forum become more and more fragile. Sometimes I have a keyboard delay of more than 1 second today. Sometimes it takes more than 10 minutes before other given answers appear in a thread. I struggle massively with inserting the name of a person for addressing a comment by copy&paste - and in my cultural background calling persons with a correct spelling is important.

When I suggest a code for an if condition, the interface is such smart, that it inserts the end automatically and indents the body. But if only the condition matters, I have to delete the empty body and the end again. If I open a new code box afterwards, the automagic indentation is active. Trying to delete the inserted spaces manually let me fail frequently, because I delete more spaces and move to the previous line, which removed the code box also. Then trying to re-create the code box again with Ctrl-E causes troubles with the tabs of the browser - see above. I must spend a lot of time with removing and fixing the automagically inserted code.

I think it is obvious, that I like to solve Matlab problems, but being impeded by the interface frustrates me for many years now. Sometimes I switch to another forum with an intuitively working interface to calm down. It is supported by one single person in his spare-time. If there is a problem, it takes up to 12 hours until it is fixed. The name of a person is ineserted already, if I press a "cite" button. There I can concentrate on my answers, not on finding workarounds for strange decisions and bugs of the interface.

The MathWork's team has my full respect and they are doing a great job. Contacting them has been very productive in every case. But I speculate that perhaps the management decided for a far to complex interface for the forum and the pile of features causes troubles, which do not let my type simple answers in a dull way. It take months or years to fix problems and until now each step forward introduced more problems than it solves. Perhaps I'm only getting old, but for me the interface is too smart to be useful. The usability should rule.

Currently I cancel about 2 to 5 of my answers per day, when I struggle too hard, e.g. if I fix a wrong indentation the 5th time, because the interface overrides my editings automagically when I type a closing parenthesis. Then I delete my partially written answer and search for a question, which hopefully causes less conflicts between what I want to type and what the interface let me.

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Image Analyst 2020-10-29

My Firefox can gradually creep up to 15 GB in memory usage. Beyond 2 GB it gets very sluggish. For example, it will freeze and if I type ahead anyway, it will get some, but not all of my letters. I think that is one of the problems you are having. Actually after about 3 GB it's virtually unusable. Not seeing what you type for 5-10 seconds, and then having it lose some of them is aggravating. Plus, even using the scrollbar on the left to move the page up and down takes many, many seconds to refresh the page - it's not "live".

And it takes forever to bring up a page. Usually when I click on an Answers link it takes 30 seconds to a minute to come up. Not sure if this delay is caused by database lookups to populate the right hand side with useful links that Answers does. Other web sites (like this one) can come up faster (6 seconds) if they don't have much content or do much database searching. I just did a time test to bring up the page with my Answers on it, and it took 45 seconds to come up (with 2.1 GB of memory in use).

I usually operate Firefox with a few dozen tabs open and even if I don't do anything, it quickly climbs to over a GB of RAM. Click on a few things and it's quickly up to 2 GB. If I just leave it sit for a few hours it creeps up to 5 GB or more. It's like it's pre-fetching all kinds of content from all kinds of links that I might be expected to click on to speed things up in case I click on them, but actually it does just hte opposite - it slows things down. To get around the memory usage creep, I even told Firefox to use just 2 processes in it's options but it seems to use 8 anyway, at least that's what task manager shows. This was one of the Firefox help recommendations, but didn't seem to work.

I was about to bail on Firefox and try the new Edge, but, like Chrome, there is still no way to pin my book mark panel to the left side in Chrome or Edge so that's a deal breaker for me. They used to have it in Internet Explorer, but then took it out when Edge replaced IE, and a lot of users left Edge and went to Firefox. Anyway, I'm going to shutdown Firefox and restart it, which sometimes generates a crash report. This will make it a lot more responsive, at least until the memory usage gets above about 2.5 GB.

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Answer 5

ryan jenson 2019-3-25

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https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/answers/438664-strange-behavior-of-the-editor-in-the-forum#answer_367146

编辑：ryan jenson 2019-6-17

try turn it into a hyperlink like this site by giving appropriate spacing at the end of the link.

this is what i do .

Hope this is helpful.

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madhan ravi 2019-3-25

https://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/438664-strange-behavior-of-the-editor-in-the-forum#comment_658003

Jan 2019-6-17

@ryan jenson: Which of the problems should be fixed by this? What exactly is "appropriate spacing"?

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Answer 6

Jan 2019-3-28

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https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/answers/438664-strange-behavior-of-the-editor-in-the-forum#answer_367884

I can confirm, that the paragraphs are shown correctly now without additional blank lines on top of it. The screen does not scroll away regularily, when a message exceed the screen height, but this happens only sometimes and in 90% of the cases it does not scroll the cursor out of view, but to the bottom line of the window. This problem is still not fixed reliably.

Unfortunately I see a new feature now: a weird growing and blinking cursor appears sometimes, see this screen shot (Win7/64, Firefox 66.0.1/64):

When I type, the cursor expands to the right. I do not know why it starts after the "The..." here, but te actual writing cursor is behind the "pro" currently.

It disappears, if I save the message and re-open it for editing.

@MathWorks: The GUI of Matlab Answers does not work reliably and intuitively for many years now. I cannot understand, why a company, which is famous for producing reliable software, is willing to present a broken web interface in public. I haven't seen such troubles in any other internet forum yet.