Petition to remove the Inline Linking tool from WP 4.5

Hi
this is what I get ALL the time:
https://www.screencast.com/t/isOTZbYq9K
the box doesnt go away. makes my blog writing experience slower.

Yes, we were able to reproduce this issue and we’ve reported this to the core team. You can follow the progress here: https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/36732

PS: Please don’t comment on this trac ticket unless you have more info about this issue. It’s not a support thread so please keep it clean so the team could work fast. Also, to participate just click on “Watch this ticket.” Thank you. ??

It’s worth noting that the bug discovered is a FireFox only bug, it does not affect any other browsers at this time.

Over the last couple of years the way I use image links has slowly been degrading. What used to be a simple and quick task, is now tedious and extremely frustrating ….

I have a number of blogs with blocks of little product images (Amazon products etc) in rows. When a link is broken or product discontinued, I USED to be able to simply click on the image in the WYSIWYG post writing screen – and change BOTH the image URL link and the page link, in one go. Replacing with a completely new product or just update to new images/pages. Less than a minute for each product … easy peasy.

Now it takes simply ages, as I have first find the broken image in the WYSIWYG editor, copy the text there so I can go search for the image AND the text links in the html editor … to then paste the new links in (very carefully). … Then go back to the WYSIWYG editor, search again for the product – to make sure I have corrected the right one, and also not broken the formatting.

And now in the latest upgrade, there is this teeny little box where I can’t see even the domain name in full – let alone the link. So I have to click inside the box and cursor along to make sure it is all good. Seriously?

Is there ever going to be any way to go back to the full HUGE image editor – where there were options all in one block, lots of space, no scrolling, no having to do like 100 extra clicks?

This is a problem with the mobile, iOS, version of Safari as well. Sure it might be related to a plugin or a theme. However it did work perfectly with the old version of WordPress and if you like your links to be opened in a new Windows or tab this actually adds another click so no, it is not smother or more efficient. In fact I can not even get the damn thing to work way too many times. That is I can not add any link. I have to do it manually in the code to get things to work.

Finally pardon me for not having the time to switch theme, switching all plugins on and off. Not just now anyhow. I’m just a lazy blogger and like things to work a setting would be fine or a plugin that simply give me the old way back would be appreciated. Sorry for taking up any of your precious time. Peace!

My plugins

AddtoAny
Admin Custom login
Akismet
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Cookie Law info
Disqus Comment System
WordFence
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WP Statistics
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Yost SEO

The inline linking tool totally blows. It slows down inserting links by 200 per cent.

I’m tired of a floating inline linking tool windows that are extremely difficult to get rid of. Tired of having the inline linking tool insert ‘_wp_link_placeholder’ or ‘undefined’ as a link and tired of having to constantly scroll up to the top of the page selecting the link and the unlink icon trying to insert a link.

We publish a newspaper and this “feature” is adding more than 30 minutes to every story we publish. In the short time since this ‘feature’ was introduced we’ve reached the point where we are now seriously looking for another platform to migrate our publication to.

And like other people here, pardon us for not wanting to disable our essential plugins including security plugins, or totally pull down our publication for something that worked perfectly well in the previous version.

If WordPress can’t accept criticism of something that is clearly causing many people a lot of problems then it’s probably better we spend the time switching to a different platform than waste our time (and destroy our online site) by fault testing something that worked perfectly fine before.

[ Signature moderated ]

And like other people here, pardon us for not wanting to disable our essential plugins including security plugins, or totally pull down our publication for something that worked perfectly well in the previous version.

It’s the only way that troubleshooting ever works. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to but if you need to sort this out that’s the way to do it.

If you have a site that you depend on and use professionally then it should not be a big ask that you know how to replicate your whole site in a QA or dev environment.

*Scrolls back*

This topic really has been overrun with complaints. That’s fine. It’s not really productive aside from any perceived therapeutic value but it doesn’t accomplish anything. The post above using filters does help others though.

For anyone who’s interested in actually working to get this sorted out then per the forum welcome please post your own topic. You can do that via this link.

https://www.ads-software.com/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting#postform

If you do post a topic please be aware that you’ll be asked to try some of the following.

Please look at the 4.5 Master List to see if your situation matches any of those scenarios.

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/read-this-first-wordpress-45-master-list?replies=7

If not then please try the following temporary steps to troubleshoot:

• Switch to the Twenty Fifteen theme
• Deactivate all of your plugins, no exceptions
• Clear your browser’s cache and cookies
• Re-login and visit the post editor

Do you still get the problem when you do that?

When you use the inline linking feature, can you enabled your browser’s javascript debugger? The steps for that can be found here.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Using_Your_Browser_to_Diagnose_JavaScript_Errors

Having that information can be very useful to determine what’s going on and sorting this out.

Please do not pile on other people’s topic. “Me too” isn’t how these forums work and it just distracts from the original poster’s problem that they are trying to solve.

*Re-reads*

That’s a bit more than I intended to post. While I do get that some people are unhappy about this new feature, when people pile on and attempt to troubleshoot here it just doesn’t help them sort it out.

looks like the developers of WP doesnt care about this no matter how much we complain. this thing just ruined my blogging experience. Im thinking of demoting to pre 4.5. I hope it wont be a security problem.

Hi,

WordPress is an open source project so there are no “developers of WordPress.”

All of us are contributors who do this in our free time because we love this project. So if you want you can also be one of the developers. And millions of people are using the latest version. So if only a dozen of people have complained about this issue, we can’t say that there are so many complaints.

So far all of us at support love this feature. And we are also a user, just like you all. This feature wasn’t just added but a lot of people were behind it and a lot of people, who tested the beta, found no issues. And now that we’ve found some bugs, we can’t just fix it on the go. You will have to wait for an upcoming release. There must be a lot of faults with this, but improving is also an option instead of just reverting it back.

And if nothing then I hope you will consider following forum guidelines which suggest you to not hijack over someone else’s thread. We’re trying to reproduce this issue (we are able to reproduce this is Firefox only) and hopefully it will be fixed in an upcoming release.

And it’s not possible to help if you can’t disable all the plugins because it could also be caused by a plugin for a lot of people. In fact some people were facing this issue just because of using an outdated plugin.

Hope you will understand and try to cooperate. If you can’t do it on your live site then you can try to create a test site for it. ??

“WordPress is an open source project so there are no “developers of WordPress”

Someone makes the decisions. People like to romanticize this “open source project” concept, but still, there is an hierarchy and there are decisions makers.

Someone, very wrongly, decided we have to be punished with this silly inline link thing. So be it, it’s for free, we have to take it. But stop the nonsense like me or John Smith would have a saying if we would had express our repulse for this aberration in a previous stage.

“And millions of people are using the latest version. So if only a dozen of people have complained about this issue, we can’t say that there are so many complaints.”

Demagogy, demagogy. Just look at the ratio of plugins installations vs feedback. People just tend to be quiet about things.

You need to get involved during the development process, otherwise the feature will be implemented.
https://make.www.ads-software.com/core/

“And if nothing then I hope you will consider following forum guidelines which suggest you to not hijack over someone else’s thread. “

Right. Than you can start by stopping hijacking a petition for the removal of an unwelcome change pushing it to the support sphere.

“You need to get involved during the development process, otherwise the feature will be implemented.”

Oh… and if I and these folks were involved during the development process, there would be no feature, right? Does it works by raising hands?

NOTE: I’m not on the core team, I’m part of the support team. All opinions are mine alone and do not necessarily represent any group I’m part of.

I’m always happy when I get that out of the way. ??

Here goes.

Someone makes the decisions. People like to romanticize this “open source project” concept, but still, there is an hierarchy and there are decisions makers.

Fun factoid (I wish I had a balloon pop up): those decisions are all public and very well discussed.

https://make.www.ads-software.com/core/

It’s not “romanticized”, it really is openly discussed and developed with weekly meetings in Slack. The transcript are public too. Yes, you need a Slack account to view those but that’s not really a burden.

Demagogy, demagogy. Just look at the ratio of plugins installations vs feedback. People just tend to be quiet about things.

Yeah. No.

This is so off topic. It’s fine to complain, it really is. This is the Request and Feedback sub-forum and this is all feedback. Just like the review section feedback is welcomed.

But try to remain factual, OK? Name calling isn’t long tolerated here. Everyone is expected to remain civil.

When any new feature is introduced there is always going to be a percentage of users that fall into the “I have a real problem” and “I do not like the new feature”. When the user base is in the millions then even a small percentage is a large number.

If someone has a problem, as in the inline feature is not working as it’s supposed to then please work with the other support volunteers in your own troubleshooting topic. That’s what my reply above was about.

I personally do not like how WordPress is developed! Your attitude is horrible!

No one posted that here, I’m just trying to be complete.

*Queue the campfire music*

WordPress is used by a growing segment of the whole Internet. It’s adoption is successful because of the users and developers working together.

But please do not mistake this open source project as a commercial product. It’s not. It’s not semantics: no one is paid to support anyone here, no one is paid to develop code on a spec for this project. Just like you we are all volunteers here.

The development process is open and out there but the code will continue to be developed and new features will be introduced. Your feedback can help the next iteration of code become better for everyone.

You don’t like a new feature? Suggest improvements. Illustrate the problems. Do not post angry. That’s how it works here. You wouldn’t work for free to support someone who’s not being positive, would you?

By the way, someone up there mentioned, and I guess in a pretty accurate way, that millions of persons use WordPress. Just to be sure I am understanding… your view of the decision making process suggests a discussion simultaneously involving “millions of persons”. Millions of persons discussing if this inline thing should be implemented or not? Most of them with no tech preparation for it (like myself)… is it really the way you idealize the WordPress world?

You don’t like a new feature? Suggest improvements. —> Most of us in this topic already did: cut the need of doubling the number of clicks to do something basic like “open in new tab”. And the choice to decide if the link is DO FOLLOW or not.

Now, apart from this. There is something I still don’t get: isn’t this “feature” supposed to equally act for external links completion? Because in my case doesn’t. At all. Whenever I am inserting an external link I will have to type it all (or paste) as before as soon as I started typing the URL, it would suggest the correct full address.