The 'Magically-clearing Edit Window'.

This is the only forum I post to, so I don’t know if it happens with all similar boards or not, but if I am in the posting window and am foolish enough to double-click a word in the pursuit of, say, highlighting it for formatting, the entire editing window resets.

Every time. It just takes away everything I just typed/edited, and presents me with whatever I originally had - be that a blank window, or someone else’s full quote. I can’t find any way to make it put this information back.

It is driving me absolutely insane.

Is it the SDMB? Is it Firefox? Is it some weird Firefox plug-in that says nothing about massively screwing with editing but does it anyway?

I don’t know. All I know is it is really, really, really ticking me off, and I’d really (also x3) appreciate any help for why this happens and explain how to fix it.

Cheers,

  • BWP

(Should this have gone in IMHO? I just couldn’t make up my mind.)

My IE7 highlights the word and does nothing else.

I’m trying to reproduce this error you’re talking about. Sometimes when you do a qucik double-double click you highlight the entire body and not just the word, then if you begin typing with everything highlighted you “write over” everything. Do you look at the monitor when you type, or are you looking at the keyboard and not noticing when this occurs?

I believe if you hit cntl-z you can recover what you accidentally erased.

Hope this helped.

I’ve tried your to replicate your problem with IE7 and can’t. A double click highlites a word and a triple click highlights the paragraph. Maybe it’s a Firefox thing? If you still have IE loaded, try using that instead.

Hmm, this is interesting. When I went into reply, it was in Guided Mode (an option below the formatting bar) and try as I might, I could not get it to delete on double-click. I wanted to test the ctrl-z thing.

Anyway, I switched it to Enhanced Mode, and suddenly double-click deletes everything I’ve typed. I say to myself, “A-hah! So all I must do is avoid Enhanced Mode and all will be well!” and I went back to Guided Mode, thoroughly satisfied with myself.

Unfortunately, now that the window has found its way back to 'Delete everything new on double-click’, even going back to Guided Mode brings me the same problems. (Oh, and ctrl-z doesn’t fix it, unfortunately.)

I don’t recall ever seeing myself in Enhanced Mode before now, but it’s not something I would have really looked for, either. I’ll keep an eye on future posting windows and see if it’s related. Obviously I can see now that switching between one and the other is to be avoided, but it doesn’t really explain why I’ve had this problem without manually changing to Enhanced Mode.

Very mysterious.

It’s still not doing it for me in Guided or Enhanced mode. Sorry, I’m not helping, am I? :slight_smile:

Just highlights the text for me (Firefox 2/Ubuntu).

I could not reproduce your error. Tell us more about your OS and hardware. Specifically the mouse. What kind is it, does it have any fancy buttons or anything like that?

It’s a Microsoft optical five-button mouse (left and right side do backwards/forwards web page browsing) with a scroll wheel in the middle.

According to ‘My Computer’, this is my OS info and the rest of my hardware stats:
[ul]
[li]OS is Windows XP Home Edition, SP2[/li][li]Computer: Intel Pentium 4 CPU, 3.2GHz[/li][li]RAM: 2GB[/li][/ul]

Odd that it doesn’t seem to do it to anyone else.

I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.4 as my primary browser. I’ve got a fair few add-ons installed, none of which give the faintest indication that they’ll play funny buggers with my post editing…but I’m in the process of going through them and un-installing any I don’t consider absolutely critical, just in case!

I’ve got the same browser and same OS as you (but a sadly, sadly slower machine) and nothing happens when I double click the text editing area - neither in guided mode nor enhanced mode.

I am thinking it’s a browser configuration issue OR you have your mouse buttons configured to refresh the page on double-click.

Windows XP and Firefox 2.0 here - not happening to me.

The first thing I would try is replacing the mouse. Do you have a cheap mouse with only two buttons around? I would try that. I suspect the mouse is defective or (less likely) the mouse driver.

One suggestion: download Firefox Portable from PortableApps and install it to a new folder on your hard drive. (Firefox Portable is meant to run from USB drives, so it won’t affect your existing Firefox installation.) Run Firefox Portable (which has no extensions installed by default) and see if the double-click problem still exists. If the problem goes away, it may be an extension issue.

No, it’s a good mouse, so it shouldn’t be that.

Thanks for the suggestion about Firefox Portable, **twopiecesofeight **- I’ll give that a shot! Also, I’ll look into configuration issue side of things, ZipperJJ.

Thank you to everyone who’s trying to help me with my temperamental interface! :slight_smile: