Comment Preview

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I have removed the WordPress plugin that has been providing the Comment Preview option because it is very old, no longer supported and it doesn’t comply with current standards. The plugin has never fully worked as it should in that it displayed characters in the preview that ended up as a ? when the comment appeared on the site. Unfortunately there is no alternative plugin available so this feature has had to go.

26 comments on “Comment Preview”

  1. If it had to go so be it. But it is sad, I personally used it prior to every comment I made. May I ask that you look round for an alternative if one should become available.

  2. I think I’m partly to blame for this! A few days ago I tried posting a couple of Greek words and, although they came up OK in the preview, they ended up as rows of ??????s.

    I suppose an ‘edit’ button is too much to ask for, is it? Would be really useful if you can manage it!

  3. S. Panza & FirmlyDirac
    I too bemoan the loss of the comment preview option, which I added shortly after I became administrator, and will do all I can to reinstate it, or provide an edit option. However, I am limited by the availability of currently supported WordPress plugins that will provide one or both of these options. Unfortunately, like all IT, WordPress is developing rapidly and unsupported plugins quickly become incompatible with the current version.

  4. Gaufrid: thanks for coming back. A big thank you for all that you and others, from admin to bloggers do to make 225 so interesting and magnetic. Please keep up the good work!

  5. Not many comments here for this issue.
    I, for one, think this is a real shame.

    “because it is very old, no longer supported and it doesn’t comply with current standards”
    But it worked, so what does that means?
    Progress?
    “The plugin has never fully worked as it should in that it displayed characters in the preview that ended up as a ? when the comment appeared on the site”
    How important is that? (if that’s true anyway)

    This post has italics in it but I cannot check anymore whether it went well or not.
    (mainly because of some terribly out-of-date ways to do these kind of things in WordPress)
    How important is that?

    Very, in my opinion.

  6. I actually never understood why in the year 2017 we’d have to italicise words using codes like , in professional software.
    That’s probably my main point.
    Meanwhile, not having the option to ‘preview’ a comment is really a bad thing (at least, for me it is).

  7. I cannot even tell you all that I meant and (without spaces!).
    I couldn’t even check this – that’s the problem, see?

  8. See, there you are.
    Even using ‘spaces’ makes a mess of this.
    Commenters using italics (or bold etc) will understand what I mean, others may be puzzled by my comments.
    Of which this is my last and final one.

  9. Sil @5-8
    I didn’t take this decision lightly. A lot of time has been spent during the last few weeks updating the theme used for this site to make it compatible with the latest version of WordPress and thus avoid the current multitude of reported errors.

    A single click on the Preview Comment button generates 24 reported errors, which is unacceptable. As I said, the plugin is no longer supported. It was last updated over six years ago and there have been a lot of changes to WordPress since then.

  10. That’s fair enough, Gaufrid.
    And sorry for my ‘disturbing’ comments in which I couldn’t fully make clear what I meant.

    It would have been nice if the software had buttons for ‘italic’, ‘bold’ etc.
    But it hasn’t, so we’ll have to deal with it.
    Apart from the fact that I really appreciated (and used) the preview option as such, it was also helpful when inserting a smiley – for example, if you forget to insert a space the smiley won’t appear which the preview will make clear.

    But if, as you say (and of course, I believe you), the preview has unacceptable side-effects it should go.

    Sad but in today’s world there are things that are worse.

  11. Thanks for the time involved in fiddling behind the scenes, Admin. Dunno whether it is related, but the site has been running pretty slow the pass few days for me and I have been occasionally unable to post comments (said my capture was wrong, but even with my bad maths I was pretty sure I was completing the sum correctly.

  13. Thanks for speedy response, Gaufrid – have made a note of the site feedback page in case I need to report anything. Site quicker than it was yesterday, so fingers crossed progress is being made. 🙂

  14. I’ve had a couple of captcha issues this week but they could have just been getting them wrong. But I seem to be getting signed out daily too.

  15. In addition to my post @10 (forget about the other ones), I’ll have to say that there was another positive thing about using the preview.
    I just commented on a recent FT puzzle and it is much easier / more comfortable to read the preview (and make amendments or correct typos) than the text in the comment’s box.
    All the more if the comment is so long that one has to scroll.
    If at one point the preview returns, I will be first one to raise a glass!

  17. I note, and share, all your concerns. I am working on it and am optimistic that a solution will be available within the next week or so.

  19. I sympathise strongly with Sil’s laments (and it’s even more important when inserting a link, as Cookie mentions), but appreciate Gaufrid’s reaons for dispensing with it. As Sil says, it would be great if there were a button for italics and bold (and link). Cf Guardian blog (but of course that is probably different software — and isn’t a feature of the android implementation, which is what I mostly use, anyway).

  20. Btw, special characters always seem to appear as a black block or question mark on my phone, anyway, so it’s good for me if people are discouraged from using them (at least until that problem is overcome).

  23. Cookie, it’s not that they don’t work, it’s just that it’s easy to make mistakes with html and harder to notice them without Preview.

  24. Constructive comment. The science fiction news site File 770 is powered like this one by WordPress and uses a comments add-on which not only has buttons for boldface, italics, link and “quote” (blockquote indent) but shows roughly how the HTML will appear in a box below the comment entry box and allows a few minutes for afterthoughts – if some intended effect doesn’t work when the comment is posted, you can re-edit it.

    Worth investigation?

  26. David
    Thanks for the suggestion and link. I have been investigating the possibility of a WYSIWYG comment editor (there is one under test in my sandbox at the moment) but the plugin used by the site you linked to could be a possible alternative.

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