And I just found a smoking gun. When pasting a URL from Firefox to IE so that I could reply to a message, I closed a pop-up box withtout paying attention to it, and the reply was broken in IE, too. So I refreshed the page to see the pop-up box again, and it said that only secure content was being shown. When I clicked on the “show unsecure content” button instead of just clicking to close it, the reply box is working again. So the problem is that the reply to message material is unsecured (an I’m assuming the viewing of user details, and viewing of hidden messages problems I’ve noted) while other content on the page is secured. It is officially a borking caused by the https “upgrade.”
Thanks for reporting this. I’ll have the techs look into it.
As of right now, same here. Also, the multiquote buttons are not working (don’t change to orange when I click them), but they did just a few minutes ago. Weird.
Old theme, Firefox 57.0.2, desktop, Windows 10 (updated a day or two ago).
It’s happening again.
Test from Firefox
John our tech guy continues to tinker with HTTP redirects and other inscrutabilia. Once he gets things stabilized we’ll see what problems remain. We appreciate your patience.
Thanks. Just to be clear, I wasn’t really complaining. It’s not a huge deal to work-around it, but I figure someone should know.
Everything seems to be working okay for me now. I use NoScript, and this time I unblocked some blocked addresses. Maybe that was part of my problem.
I’m going to be looking for an inscrutabilia blocker ASAP.
In the mean time you can get around most of these problems by removing the “s” in “https” at the beginning of the link to a thread.
That doesn’t work at the main forum listing because it gets immediately redirected to the https site, but for example this thread loaded from:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=844215
instead of:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=844215
allows editing, multi-quoting, smilies, etc.
No matter what I’ve done, I’ve never gotten redirected to the HTTPS site. In fact, if I intentionally load the HTTPS site manually, and then make any posts, I get redirected back to the HTTP site.
As of this morning, all problems seem to have cleared up in Firefox for Windows.
nm. As soon as I posted about the problem, it went away. All looks good now.
I posted this in the wrong thread earlier:
Okay, this is weird: I can use the buttons on this linked thread, but not on the original thread or on any answers I post. So the quoted text above still applies. The board is broken for me.
There are some problems with HTTPS. I would guess you are reaching the threads that work through HTTP and the ones that don’t work with HTTPS.
I found exactly the same thing: the formatting buttons work in IE only when I tell it to show insecure content. Chrome and Firefox don’t ask about showing insecure content, and the buttons don’t work at all there. Whatever script is behind those buttons needs to be updated to make them secure.
None of the buttons (bold, italics, hyperlink etc) work for me anymore. On any browser. (On edit, it works in safari)
Funny, I noticed that, too. They work when editing, but not when originally composing. The mystery deepens! 
It’s not a mystery - they work over HTTP, they don’t work over HTTPS. It all depends how you got to the page.
By changing where the board is looking for some scripts used in the editor, I’ve got formatting buttons fixed in the posting editor over HTTPS—at least for myself. Hoping that has just fixed most of the outstanding problems.
I’m actually having the same problem, as of now. Many of the buttons don’t work, or are replaced by text instead of the icon. The formatting buttons within posting don’t work either. If I can manually go to the HTTP link, then they seem to work, but i have to do it each page.