Forum:Request disabling automatic use of VisualEditor

Although we are presently discussing a policy to prevent forced features, I feel we should also draft a separate request for Wikia Staff to disable use of the VisualEditor on this wiki by all people.

When VisualEditor was announced, I was optimistic that it would fix many of the nagging problems present in the Rich Text Editor (aka the WYSIWYG editor), such as the addition of blank lines, breaking of complicated templates, etc. Before VisualEditor, we could force people to edit in source mode by adding __NOWYSIWYG__ to especially sensitive pages, but VisualEditor simply ignores those tags.

Right now, the Visual Editor is disabled by default for registered users, but it can be enabled in each person's preferences. However, it is enabled by default for all unregistered users. This means that any page that an unregistered user can edit which has complex code can be broken by that user, even if they don't directly edit the "complex" feature; this is apparent on our Battles page, as well as many others. On top of that, we have no way to prevent use of the VisualEditor on these pages, as the software ignores the __NOWYSIWYG__ tags. The only way to prevent VisualEditor being used on these pages extensively is to limit access to the page. It would be highly detrimental to semi-protect that page and other pages simply because they contain complex text. So, our only options left are to appeal to Wikia Staff to disable default VisualEditor use for unregistered editors on the wiki, to semi-protect all "breakable" pages on the wiki, or get used to having to constantly clean up after the collateral damage of this latest experiment.

Therefore, I am requesting that we contact Wikia Staff and respectfully ask them to disable VisualEditor for anonymous users on the wiki. --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 22:48, July 5, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion
Or at least not make it the "default" editor. Anonymous editors can go back to the old editor by clicking on the drop-down menu and selecting "Classic Editor", but who's honestly going to do that every single time? Therefore I support this proposal. VisualEditor, at least until 100% of its kinks are ironed out, should be completely optional. --k6ka (talk &#124; contribs) 22:50, July 5, 2014 (UTC)
 * Per the above, I support making VisualEditor optional for all users. Ѧüя◎ґ (talk) 22:53, July 5, 2014 (UTC)


 * Support - Sometimes the VisualEditor is making the users mistaking their edits.  .ThePeculiarMe  |  (talk to me)  |  (my mistakes)  01:04, July 6, 2014 (UTC)


 * Support - for reasons stated above. Dharden (talk) 02:21, July 6, 2014 (UTC)

Support - I agree with K6ka's opinion. --  C.Syde  ( talk &#124;  contribs ) 05:20, July 6, 2014 (UTC)


 * Support - Icemandeaf (talk) 05:29, July 6, 2014 (UTC)

Comment I suspect VisualEditor is responsible for unexplained removal of content, such as this one. If VisualEditor is this horribly broken, it must be disabled ASAP. I understand how difficult it was for Wikia to develop this editor, but at the same time, Wikitext is not an easy language to understand, and this should seriously be a "Beta" feature, not a "Beta feature but we'll pretend it's picture perfect." --k6ka (talk &#124; contribs) 14:19, July 8, 2014 (UTC)

Seeing as we have a unanimous consensus, I've gone ahead and contacted Wikia requesting that the VisualEditor is disabled by default for unregistered users. I'll keep this thread open until I receive a response. 23:09, July 10, 2014 (UTC)