hgrapid wrote:I recently posted three new pages. When I started the page, I filled in only the basic information first, because the new editor is not user friendly. However, I have been able to make edits using the Old Format or Ancient Format. I am seeing issues centering photos with the Old Format. It seems to work in the Ancient Format.

In the New Format editor, if I cut and paste text, it comes in very poorly:

X Mountain is very pretty
It is accessed from the lake
There is some scrambling

If I try and make edits, I can't go back and delete words, or change spelling, because the New Editor simply won't allow me to go back in between words. I just have to delete everything in the paragraph and rewrite the entire piece.

I can add images, but functionality isn't so great. The old photo editor was far better.

There are lots of old functionalities no longer functional. Searching for users with the advanced function doesn't work. I had problems posting to the forum because I would try and it would go right back to my profile page. I cannot search my own mountains and rocks anymore. They come in alphabetically. I cannot search them by state or by hits or by score or recently edited, etc.

I will never give up on SP as long as I can still create a page. If SP only has the new editor, I would no longer be able to create a page. Ads or no ads, the functionality of adding pages is clearly not working well.

As for ads, when I try to get rid of an ad by clicking "x" it asks me why. Some ads I cannot click off. Ads are shown in between paragraphs. This really impacts the continuity of the page. I can see how ads are okay on the side of the screen, or on top, but in between paragraphs in the Getting There Section is a problem.

It looks like this:

From Phoenix drive 10 miles north on I-17. Take a left at exit 56 where you will see a sign for the trailhead.

ALLEGRA - FOR YOUR ALLERGIES...AD AD AD

Parking is available with bathrooms.

JIMMY DEAN for U.S. Congress 2018 - Fighting For YOU!

There is a parking permit required that you can obtain at the station.

I know what you're saying. I tried to add one sentence to a page today and it took 20 minutes and several computer freeze-ups before I gave up. As you point out, creating a page takes many times longer than it used to and just doesn't work well. The ads really make viewing the pages impractical as well. It is sad and it was a good run (16 years), but I just don't see things getting better (unless maybe a corporate sponsor takes over the site).

If more ads are needed to support the server, but those ads make viewing pages impractical, less people will view them and viewership will continue to decline. Since adding a page is way more effort now than it used to be, fewer and few people will add any more pages, adding to the decline. It doesn't seem like anything can be done about this and the demise seems inevitable, despite the fine efforts to keep the site afloat.

It has been almost a year since I've posted anything, and whatever happened in that time has made it much more difficult to contribute anything meaningful in the ways I'm used to doing.

I was hoping to add a new album, but upon seeing how albums no longer display pictures the way they used to (top 15 voted pics in a table at the bottom of the page), this seemed like a deterrent. Also, what gives with the way images are now displayed for a page? They're all squashed horizontally so that only wide panos show up nicely unless you click on the actual picture. So at a glance, it's difficult to tell which pics are really good ones since the entire top and bottom are completely cut off. So in a vertical shot, for example, there's no telling what the complete picture would show since only a sliver of the middle part is displayed.

Moving to the next step, I figured I'd just make a trip report and add some pictures that way. The bulk uploader was always my bread and butter for submitting pictures in the past, but the version I'm using (Summitpost Bulk Uploader 1.0.0.12 created by Michael Stanton in 2009) no longer seems to work. Is there a new one out that is compatible with the latest Summitpost changes? I understand why the admins might not want everybody clogging the servers with photos of areas that are already on SP, but I'm usually selective about the ones I include in a trip report and do minor touch-ups to all of the ones I include. Creating any sort of meaningful trip report where you want to include a few dozen photos would be EXTREMELY painful and monotonous if you had to submit each one individually.

So to summarize, I'm basically wondering if SP is now stuck the way it is (it took work to contribute in the past, but doing so now seems on par with banging one's head against a wall, and realistically would take 10x the effort, which Scott mentioned previously). If this is the case, I'm sad to say that the number of people who would even consider making the effort to contribute would go way down, as I'm sure it has already. Unless changes are made to return things to being at least somewhat user-friendly, I don't see myself making any more contributions, to be honest. I suppose it's no big loss, since my posts are usually just of easier well-known hikes and scrambles anyways, but I have to think that I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Because new releases and even updates of software can prove to be full of bugs, I am always hesitant to try them right away. However, recognizing that my Little Devils Tower page https://www.summitpost.org/little-devils-tower/172671 has been needing some updates, I finally gave it a try. Scary. Like Scott and Rocky Alps said, the new editor is not user-friendly.

This is sad, because we all know from our past experiences with SP that it really does not have to be that way. And we can see elsewhere on the web that many other types of large sites can be user-friendly. It's true that whoever has been making and updating the new SP software knows more about such things than I do. But apparently they do not know enough to make a user-friendly base. The evidence for that speaks loudly. SP needs some higher-level help here to get these very serious bugs worked out. I hate to see long-time SP members quitting, but I understand their frustration.

I dislike the idea of just becoming an occasional spectator at SP, but I too, do not want to be "banging my head against a wall". To the powers-that-be at SP, please get some help with these problems before SP crashes and burns. This has been a very good and helpful site for many years and I think it's worth fixing. Thank you.

I hear you and agree that something has to be done to make it easier to edit and create pages, particularly with uploading images in bulk. There needs to be an easy way to drag and drop a group of images. I am working on this.

In addition to the new editor, we still have all historical editors available that were used to create all pages on the site since 2006 or so, so it is possible to create and edit pages as was done for the past 12 years. I do understand that's not sufficient though.

This new editor (named Redactor 3) that was chosen for the newest version of the editor simply doesn't work well for some historical pages on SP. I think I'm going to throw in the towel on it and look at new options, though I'm concerned there aren't any that will work with pages that contain a lot of images or tables.

Another problem is integration of an editor with SP's backend isn't easy, especially when it comes to uploading images while creating pages. It takes quite a bit of custom javascript to get it done, so that means any new option will take some work to get implemented. But I think it is the most important thing to fix on the site at this point.

panhandletrails wrote:And we can see elsewhere on the web that many other types of large sites can be user-friendly.

While this is true, I would also say that most other large websites do not have user generated (thus needing to provide an editor for end users of the site) pages anywhere near on par with SummitPost's style of pages. By that I mean pages with lots and lots of images and tables. Some pages here on SP have literally hundreds of images embedded in them. That is usually avoided on most websites and browser-based editors, as we are required to use here, do not handle extremely large and complex HTML pages well or at all. The amount of memory used by browser-based editors adds up quickly with lots of images and lots of HTML code. That's why large pages hang on editor page load in the new editor.

For complex pages such as these, it is probably going to be best to use an HTML editor at home, then copy and past the HTML into one of the older versions of the SP editor. I understand that's not ideal and will work to find something to allow for easier editing within a browser.

I am going to look into other options and try some out, but I'm concerned that there is no good way to provide a browser-based WYSIWYG editor that will work well for editing all pages here on SP. I hope that I can find something that works better though.