Spoiler and Quote Boxes are a Nightmare

[Blue Blood]

Ever made a post where you accidentally goof on the spoiler/quote tags and the board, thinking that it's being helpful, lumps the entire post into the box? And have you then tried to edit said post and found that it's impossible to edit the boundaries of the spoiler/quote box, so you end up having to delete the entire post and start from scratch? This issue has been bugging me for a very long time now. Even images can be difficult to move if they end up in the wrong place, and God forbid they end up inside a box when you didn't mean for them to be. You can't delete the box without deleting everything inside it. It's manageable but difficult to do from a desktop browser, but virtually impossible to manage from mobile devices.

I'm a bit of an oldie, so I often just use old-school BBCode tags instead of the new-fangled modern shortcuts. And should I use the shortcuts instead of BBCode, it's often not even possible to move the cursor beyond the box/embedded media unless there's already text there. So you end up in a situation where if you want to place an image/box in the middle of a post, you must first write out the entire post and then scroll back to earlier in your text to put it in. It's really annoying. Whilst we can create a post with BBCode and the board will convert these upon posting, the board doesn't actually let you view the BBCode when you're editing a post later. It's really annoying, as this would provide at least one solution to some of the issues. If you want to edit a post to add in text after an image/quote/spoiler, you're out of luck. All that there is is a blanket "remove formatting" button that doesn't work on boxes. 

Is there any solution to this? I seem to remember an admin saying that the current Invision software doesn't support displaying posts with BBCode, but is there anything else that can be done?

[Blue Blood]

BUMP! I didn't realise that it's actually been over a year since I made this thread.

Quote boxes are still totally broken. I just made this post and the quote box is messed up again. It was written in BBcode, and I know that the BBcode is correct because I literally just copied and pasted it from a post on Retro. There's supposed to be one quote box, starting with "Better than ever" and ending with "more gameplay upgrades". Everything after that should be regular text, but the board has put it in a sub-quote box.

This is what it looks like in edit mode:

But the thing is, I can't fix the post. In edit mode, I literally cannot select any of the sub-quote box (starting with the text "So... nope.") or even move the cursor to a point after the quote box. 

Why does this happen? I'm on a PC right now so remaking the entire post isn't too difficult, although I'm going to leave it as-is for the sake of reference. But on mobile where it's more difficult to type and format anyway, this completely messes everything up. Do we have any idea why this happens or what can be done about it?

 

[charmsb]

Bump again.... they are a nightmare

[Dreadknux]

Hey guys - going to look into this for you. Can you link me to the post you're trying to copy-paste from Retro so I can try and replicate the steps you're taking? EDIT: Never mind I realised you totally linked it already.

FWIW, this current version of Invision/SSMB is quite old now; it's possible that a future update will fix this issue entirely. I don't think it helps that Invision is currently using a deprecated text editor for its post/comment input, which might explain why it's not as useful as other platforms in terms of moving content elements/blocks around... I'll keep an eye on this and look to having this behaviour fixed when we come to revamp the site and forums.

EDIT2: OK so I copy-pasted the text from the Retro post and it came out pretty much intact, including Retro's CSS/styling. I clicked 'paste as plain text' which then took away all the formatting, highlighted the "BETTER THAN EVER... gameplay upgrades" section and clicked the "quote" button and it pretty much put things together perfectly.

Is the issue that you're trying to copy-paste BBCode from your Retro post (in the editor) into ours and it's coming up wonky? Can you share the BBCode you're trying to copy-paste in this case (I'm not going to get it by copying the actual post on Retro)? This may be down to the fact that we have deactivated most BBCode from the forums because it is a deprecated coding language and open to security/vulnerabilities.

I know that managing quotes etc in general in the editor is a pain in the butt, outside of this specific copy-paste use case, but that may be down to the older text editor being used in this version of Invision... which I'm hoping the Invision team upgrades for its upcoming next mainline version (any day now...).

[Blue Blood]

I apologise for not replying to this sooner. 

So this is the exact text that I C&P'd from Retro:

There's a mix of plain text with BB code in there, and some text that's already formatted (the links and the bolded text). I'm not sure if I was aware of the mix before, and probably just thought it was entirely plain text and BB code. 

The thing about BB code is that it's often way easier to type up posts in that, especially when using a mobile. As I said in the first post here, sometime you can't even move the cursor beyond media (quotes, images, spoilers etc) if you inserted the media at the end of your post. On desktop, you're able to drag and drop the media to move it, but on mobile that's not really an option.  BB code is nice because you can forgo the formatting issues that come with embedded media when you're making a post. If BB code needs to be removed/disabled because it's so old and opens up vulnerabilities, is it possible for some port of plain text editor to be reinstated? There used to be an option to switch between plain text and formatted text ages ago on an older version of Invision.

EDIT: Okay, did some testing and it appears that the mix of formatted text and plain text with code was causing the issue. I wonder if that's what's cause the issue all along? I regularly use BB code when putting quotes and spoilers into my posts because of how much easier it is on mobile.

[Dreadknux]

Yeah in general the post editor is a little janky, I think it's because it's a really old editor code that hasn't been updated in forever (not something we can change really until Invision pull their finger out about it). But in this particular instance, it does seem like what's happening here is the rich text (where you have bold text already formatted, and embedded links) is getting confused with the BBCode and the editor doesn't know what to do with it all.

BBCode is definitely useful, and I think we do support some basic tags, but overall it is deprecated so I'm a bit hesitant to open it up beyond what we already have support for. This wouldn't be so much an issue though if the editor actually played ball a lot of the time though, I understand the frustration there. 

[Blue Blood]

The board definitely supports all the code that I try to use; bold, italics, underlined, strike-through, quote, spoilers, links, images... but seems to get confused about where to close quote and spoilers. I don't have any specific examples to hand, but I'm positive that in the past it's screwed up quotes and spoilers before without any other formatting going on elsewhere. It's just a nuisance that editor gets messed up. Invision need to get their shit together; so many things are designed for mobile these days and they've dumbed down a lot of their systems in the name of modernisation, but in terms of mobile compatibility they've made everything buggy and jank as hell.