Hello my beta testers: a new comment editor

I have spent a chunk of yesterday and today writing a new comment editor. The old one, ark-commenteditor, had no support and had been ejected from the WordPress plugins for not confirming to several requirements. Most would have been fixable, license issues, use of iframes and a injection issue. AlexKar had a bit of language barrier with the WordPress plugin viewers and hasn’t updated it.

I finally got around to creating a completely new plugin to replace. That should conform as it uses the SunEditor for both current browsers and older browsers. I’ll probably add a few more editors when I get around to it and if there are any problems. It was built for multiple editing agents.

So it is time for commenters to earn their commenting ‘rights‘. Test my beta plugin and don’t hold back on the constructive criticism of the plugin and desired features. For doing so will shield you from the WordPress comment editor.

If there are problems, then the fallback is to drop down to WordPress comment editor. That is, writing plain text and HTML. You can now even toggle between WYSIWG and the WordPress editor. It will fail your change if you do something in the WordPress editor that the Sun editor doesn’t like.

• If you use a very old browser, you’ll find that it drops back from Sun editor v3 to v2. I haven’t found anything old enough for the Sun editor to fail on yet.
• If it does fail on a browser, then it will drop to the WordPress comment editor. That has been unit-tested.
• I’ve tested it on a lot of systems. But we left the really old Apple computers in storage in Auckland. I don’t want to test Internet Explorer or XT run on my gear – even in a virtual machine. I can barely get myself to run Windows 11 run in virtual machines.
• There are a limited number of smileys. If you really want more, then do the work to source them for me with a decent link in this post. But don’t wait up for me to add them
• Images and videos have to be available on the net via a URL. We aren’t a storage site. The exception will eventually be for authors and editors if I can make it work. They will get to store it in the our media library. It is on my to do list.
• If you want to insert images, then remember that white and transparent on a white background doesn’t show up. I have a to do for adding a background colour.
• I haven’t set the timed re-edit to use the new editor. Its on the to do list.
• I have deliberately limited the number of displayed videos to one per comment.
• Videos are only allowed from YouTube and Vimeo.

And now this… while we wait for the actual election results. I was playing a lot of Garbage loudly while writing this plugin.

Rights: as we all know, commenters actually have very few ‘rights’. But we usually don’t bother people who follow our very few and generous policy rules. The most important can be summarised as

• Do not cause moderators to have to work too hard
• Do not to cause me to have to go into court to protect you from your poor behaviour.
• And don’t attack authors or moderators personally, they make the site work, commenters do not.
• People who don’t bother to read about and our policy will get short shift for their poor behaviour. Ignorance isn’t an excuse when it generates more work for our volunteers. Which includes me.