Question: Just tried to publish a Replication of the KnowFlow and fail ...

Hi MadTinker, SO sorry to hear about your work lost. Really feel terrible and want to help. I'm not sure why the publish button was not active...if you have the heart to, could you give more of a detailed play-by-play and WebWG will attempt to debug? I'm personally very excited to read about your replication results, and frustrated that the website didn't help you share your work.

1) tried to load image for header. Tried both drag-drop and up-load. Both sorta worked, but image was severely cropped to the point of being useless. Finally gave up. 2) Wrote up some overall goals as well as more detailed discussion of purpose and limitations of replication. This was (I think) Item 3 of 4. Unable to publish. Tried to edit Tags with no luck. Then the form emptied. Completely. Blank.

Okay, re-accomplished the introduction. Wrote it in something else and copy/paste to avoid me screwing something up. Not sure what's been done since yesterday, but the image loaded fine and things worked as expected. Nice! When all my hardware has arrived I'll add more of the process, code, etc.

Still feeling my way around the Public Lab wiki area so if I've done something amiss, feel free to change and/or let me know what I should have done. Cheers.

I just published a note today and it was also wonky. There was some message at the top of the screen that was hovering. I had to click that off. I also "viewed" the info about Creative Commons (open source stuff). Then the publish button worked. Luckily I quickly cut and pasted into a Word doc to save my stuff just in case. I'm still newer with posting too, so hopefully between all of us we will figure it out.

wow yikes. Thanks Leslie. This is odd behavior. We will be checking it out! Do you have a time when you will be on PUblic Lab next?

Just want to add that if you are having problems attaching a file, definitely switch to the "legacy" editor. I found that there was a problem attaching files using the "Rich" editor. Have posted a bug report.

When the rich text editor went live (a year or two ago?) I gave it a try. In the middle of writing my first Rich research note I couldn't figure something out so I switched to the legacy editor which I was more familiar with. That click vanished the note I was working on which did not seem very fair. I don't know much about GUIs, but that link "For the legacy editor, click here" should definitely not have been at the top of the page for all this time if it deletes your work whenever you click it. So from then on I just used the legacy editor for all my notes.

Seeing the trouble folks have had recently posting notes, I tried the rich text editor tonight when I posted a research note. It worked fine for lots of text entry, although I stayed in "Markdown" mode a lot of the time.

After an hour of composing a note, when I was almost finished, the editor froze. I was in Rich mode, but the button to switch to Markdown said Rich, so I couldn't switch modes. The Publish button was grayed and unresponsive. There were no other options on the editor page.

So I clicked the Back arrow in Chrome which took me to a new, blank Post Note page. My note was not there. Nothing was there. But then I clicked the forward arrow in Chrome and was returned to my note and everything was back to normal, except for a few recent edits, and the title, and lead image, and tags I had added were missing.

I replaced the missing elements and then added a YouTube video embed to the note, but it did not display in Rich mode, and the iframe code disappeared from Markdown mode. I tried a couple of times, but there did not seem to be any way to add a video embed. And some other little errors had crept in which I could not fix in either mode. So I started over in the legacy editor. I had been saving the markdown text all along, so I started from a fresh Post page (legacy editor) and pasted the markdown text in and finished the note without incident as has been my experience since I swore off the Rich text editor.

I don't have any plans to try the Rich text editor again.

Chris

Hi, sorry, that's always frustrating -- there is an auto-save function in the rich editor which you can use to retrieve drafts -- it's under the ... menu on the lower left of the screen. It works only on the same browser on the same computer as you were using to write (as in, we don't auto-save on the server side for privacy reasons).

Hope that helps!

Also, a couple notes on other things you mentioned -- the main image does not get cropped, but the preview image is displayed oddly, so I can understand how that would be confusing. Finally, I believe I've seen an intermittent bug where the "publish" button will occasionally not get activated, but clicking into and out of the title input will fix this.

I'm going to file an issue for the Post button enabling so we can get this on the radar of the software folks (myself included) -- and if you'd like to highlight any of these other issues for fixes or have suggestions or feedback, please speak up, as it's extremely helpful to hear when things are not going well or not working as expected -- in fact, there's no other way for the Web team to find out!

https://github.com/publiclab/PublicLab.Editor/issues/101

Again, apologies for what sounds like a frustrating experience and thanks for writing it up. We have a very small team working on this stuff and your help is deeply appreciated.

Chris, I'm also going to open an issue for YouTube embedding -- thanks for reporting that as well: https://github.com/publiclab/PublicLab.Editor/issues/100

Both of these will take some work to flesh out -- the bug in order to narrow down what's actually happening, and the YouTube feature request will take some design work and testing to develop that new feature. But these issues initiate that process -- thanks again.

All, My apologies, my question probably came across a bit harsh. One of those days on my end.

One other observation on this particular issue that might help: the auto save versions weren't available when I was floundering around the first time. However, when i logged in again and was cut/pasting, I happened to notice they were there. Just a data point that might help track down the problem.

Thanks to all for their time and attention to these questions.