text input box of the forums not working on Android browser

[Steffen]

is there some Javascript "tricking" done at the multiline textbox for posting here in the forums...?

As soon as a post uses more than 1 line, I am not able to use the normal cursor positioning mechanism gestures on my Android tablet's native browser to edit the posted text.
i especially cannot position the cursor after the last char of the last line once i have jumoed somewhere else.
this is extremely annoying because it forces me to never go back to the text beginning to correct something, because i will never again be able to continue writing at the end.
I suggest to search that Javascript magic and simply throw it away.
The textbox shiuld work and behave like any other textbox on the inet.
I suspect that the cursor once is allowed to be at the end, hut then some script kicks in and re-puts it to somewhere else.

[Steffen]

the many spelling errors in the above post are an example for the effect.
am not able to correct the text properly while editing :-(

[Tim Gould]

Hi Steffen,

There's a lot of javascript for the text box, some of which does rely on cursor positions. However that is used to eg. correctly convert highlighted text to a link and should be there. The code is also horrid (if you look at the page source you can see it).

Unless Orion or Willy have a better understanding of javascript than I'm aware of, I suspect we'll have to wait for an external patch to fix it. Or maybe someone from the forums does and they can look. Either way, it's beyond my easy efforts and I spend enough time debugging code I understand to want to try debugging code I don't easily understand.

But we will look into it.

Tim

[Orion Pobursky]

Just out of curiosity, what browser are you using? I havent had any problems with mobile but I just realized that all the mobile browsers I use are Webkit based.

[Allen Smith]

I see this using the stock "Browser" application on Android 4.2.1. If I attempt to drag the cursor into position at the end of the last line, it always resets itself to the beginning of the line. However, I can at least return to the end of the text by tapping the whitespace at the end rather than dragging.

It's too bad the forum software doesn't have a mobile-optimized experience in general; this site is very, very hard to read on a phone. But whatever. I'm not expecting magic ponies to drop from the sky. This is way better than nothing, and I tremendously appreciate all the hard work put into it.

Allen

[Orion Pobursky]

It's too bad the forum software doesn't have a mobile-optimized experience in general; this site is very, very hard to read on a phone

I agree. This is now on the forums todo list

[Steffen]

I can also try to find the trouble in the Javascript. I'm happy to hear that the problem doesn't seem to be local at my side.
I'm experiencing the problem with the stock browser of Android 4.1.2 on a Samsung Galaxy Note.

[Steffen]

in the meantime to read forum posts you could try to use a rss feed reading app,
as this forum software offers a rss feed on the main page.
on a tablet, the site is quite usable already, if there was not all the cursor tinkering by the JavaScript

[Philippe Hurbain]

This is a test using Chrome on Nexus 7, seems working fine: I was able to correct errors automatically introduced by French spelling checker :-)

[Steffen]

yes, same here, Chrome works. It's the stock browser having the trouble.
However, I cannot yet fully switch to Chrome because the stock browser is the only one which allows me to change the user agent string,
and that is needed for many sites still unfortunately to avoid that they send me their specialized but crippled Android version of their pages. They always think I'm using a small phone screen, just because it's Android... :-(

[Tim Gould]

Don't worry. These forums will send you nothing but the larget screen browser optimised website