Forum:Disabling the RTE

I had been thinking of this for a while and having seen a few other wikis recently having it disabled, I thought I would bring it up. What would people think of disabling the rich text editor on this wiki? For those who do not know, the Rich Text Editor, or RTE for short, is the visual tab you see when you click edit if you do not already have it disabled. The RTE is prone to destroying pages, removing information, changing code and just generally not working. On many of our longer pages, myself and others have added a magic word to force the editor into source mode only when editing that page. People using the RTE are prone to changing things they never meant to change due to the editor not being friendly with code. With the amount of templates and other coding we use on pages, I think disabling it would save us some time reverting edits and allow non frequent editors to make the small changes they want without having their edits reverted because they changed something they did not mean to. If we reach a consensus to disable it, we can send a message to staff and they will disable it across the site. I'll split this forum into two sections, one for discussion, and one for voting--

Examples of what the RTE does to pages:







Discussion
I disabled the in preferences after my first year editing here and rarely ever turn it back on. And I've spent a lot of time as admin fixing its various glitches. But it has its uses and is used by people, so I would prefer if we could make the source mode editor the default with the RTE second, where you would have to click a button to switch to RTE mode (the opposite to how it is now unless you have RTE turned off in preferences). That way you can get to it when you need it and there will be much less glitches. 14:20, January 24, 2012 (UTC)
 * If that were an option, I would prefer that too, unfortunately, I do not think that is possible. I can check with staff but I have not heard of a wiki having that switched.--
 * I just checked with Sannse and she said that this is not possible. If the RTE is enabled, it is the default. There is not a way to switch this.--


 * Figures. Ah well, vote below. 22:23, January 26, 2012 (UTC)

Well, the RTE is back to category duplication now. Any more votes?--

Given that current active users and all admins have voted now (on admin talk page), I sent a request in last night to have it disabled. 12:39, March 1, 2012 (UTC)

We are now RTE free!--


 * Time to go removing all those nowhatyouseeiswhatyouget keywords. Btw, we were asked "to keep an eye out for continual improvements we make to the editor to see if you do decide to re-enable it. I understand the drawbacks for power users, but the advantages for newbies has been better than we hoped so I would hate to see their possible contributions cut out forever." 16:31, March 1, 2012 (UTC)

Voting

 * I've seen it destroy our templates over and over with people like Jirachiwish repeatedly doing it regardless of Godisme telling him not to!! SunXia   (Chat)  22:39, January 17, 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree with this the more problems we avert the better.--Lemursrule (talk) 01:44, January 18, 2012 (UTC)
 * I think it should be removed, RTE can be horrific when editing pages, and, unfortunately, it's the default when editing so new users all use it. I have it disabled at another wiki I edit at because it was believed that the RTE was destroying our reference lists and making the references appear in the articles instead of at the bottom of the page, once the RTE was disabled, we never had the problem again.
 * Having seen that it now wraps everything in span tags that literally do nothing, I feel it would be best if we disabled it.--
 * I certainly know how the RTE can warp parts of pages unintentionally from first-hand experience, so I can support disabling the RTE. Personally, I think that the most appropriate option would be making it so the Source editor is the default and for the RTE to be secondary. However, I am not sure if that can be done so disabling RTE fully may be the only option. ---Mr. N (Discuss)  00:05, January 19, 2012 (UTC)
 * Somewhat reluctant to deny it to those more comfortable with it, but getting rid of it is the lesser of two evils. 22:23, January 26, 2012 (UTC)
 * Per above comments. -- The Goblin   Talk   21:21, February 24, 2012 (UTC)