I tried to fix a typo and a notice came up that said I had been blocked from editing. There was no explanation why, nor any indication of how I could find out why. How can I find out? This has happened before, and I think it happens when I'm not using WiFi.
@AntiCompositeNumber, and yes, if this is something we need to pay someone to do because it's not interesting for volunteer developers, then of course let's for heaven's sake pay someone to solve a problem that causes high levels of editor frustration.
My apologies; I didn't mean to make this personal and shouldn't have said that. I'm just finding it so difficult to understand how anyone who adds sources to articles and uses Visual Editor to do it wouldn't be ridiculously frustrated by Vis Ed's manner of naming sources and consider this more than 'low' priority. I started editing nearly fifteen years ago. I am very comfortable with source editing, and I think I'm probably pretty unusual in that as someone who edited in source for over a decade, I now use Vis Ed for probably 99% of my editing and only switch to source when necessary. When I first encountered these refnames I didn't realize they were from Vis Ed and thought there was some really prolific editor out there who was naming stuff in ways only they could possibly understand. If you're using Vis Ed to add sources how do you workaround this problem? Are you adding the source in vis ed, then switching to source each time so you don't leave behind a meaningless ref name mess for source editors and switchers to have to deal with, then switching back to Vis Ed until you add the next ref? And if so, don't you find that incredibly frustrating when it would be so much easier if you could just specify what Vis Ed names the reference instead of having to switch to source every time you add a ref for the first time?
@Barkeep49 I won't pretend to understand why a fix would be hard, but for heaven's sake the fact something might be difficult shouldn't be a reason to downgrade its importance. That just tries to hide the biggest problems by calling them minor. It's like dropping your keys in the street but looking for them on the porch because the porch light makes it easer to search there. We should be prioritizing by actual priority as assessed by the people who are using the tool. I use this tool and honestly this is for me the single biggest frustration I have with Vis Ed. And honestly whoever decided it would be okay to make Vis Ed work like this in the first place must not actually edit. No one who had written an article from scratch would ever have thought this was by ANY measure a reasonable decision.
Why was this moved from medium to low priority?
I have the same problem using Visual Editor, but it seems to come and go. The most common result is 'couldn't make a citation for you.' Occasionally it's mangled results.
How is this still languishing after five years? Visual editor adds useless ref names such as ":2". When I need to switch to source, I can't tell which ref is which. The only way I've found to prevent this is to add a ref, switch to source before using it a second time, add a useful ref name like jonesNYT1may2020 or whatever, which besides being tedious when I'm adding more than one ref doesn't fix all the other stupidly named refs added by someone else using VE. For editors who switch back and forth often, or editors who edit primarily in source, these useless ref names are just infuriating. Why are we deciding that the priority on this should be low? It's literally to me the most irritating thing about Visual Editor.
Thanks, I see. Hm. My main concern is that requesting a self-block is seen as needy, but maybe if everyone could do it any time they wanted, it wouldn't be seen that way. Maybe having it on the block log is not really a problem. And I can see how not having it there might cause unpredictable concerns. Like someone could block themselves pre-emptively because they think a block is coming, and that way they avoid an administrative block on their account. Yeah, that actually is probably a bad idea. It needs to be on the block log.
Masumrezarock100, why does whether or not a user could block themselves need community consensus? Sorry, not trying to be argumentative, sincere question.
This process should also include some way of detecting those who overflag. And it would be nice to be able to sort flags from users of different types -- that is, if an editor is getting a ton of flags from users with under a certain number of edits, their civility problem might just require reminding them not to bite the newbies, for instance. Or to be able to sort them by the types of pages. If they're all on a single page, maybe it's more a problem that the editor getting flagged is too emotional about that subject.