I know I have been complainin' and lookin' for help.


I have found out that I have to read instructions. Specifically, Use the "HTML" button to edit the HTML tags of your review.

That's not a thing I'm used to and I hate that I'll have to do that every time I update an older review but at least I now know how to do it.

Thanks to all for jumpin' in and givin this dude a little help.

pops

It's obvious from the comments posted here that some members are familiar with the new format; having experienced a similar format at other sites.

I have never used this format before. If there was a step-by-step "owner's manual" style document posted before the format's introduction, there would be less time wasted and fewer frustrations necessarily expressed here.

For example: If I hit the "edit html" icon and do the edit, do I need to hit the icon again as a close, or do I simply proceed? How do I deal with the triple-spaces between paragraphs that will correct in edit but post incorrectly when published?

I am currently posting with less frequency due to an upcoming move to another state. I would like to post a review between the periods of chaos, but I don't have time to tinker with this thing right now. The few lines of instruction that appeared in the Member Center are wholly inadequate and are of no help to me whatsoever.

From my perspective, this poorly planned "improvement" has been introduced at the worst possible time.

BTW... I looked at "New Reviews" before this post. Several reviews were presenting rather poorly. Folks are really struggling with this thing.

I'm going to post a review soon.

If it doesn't accept a paste-in from Microsoft Word, I may very well kill someone.

Just thought I'd put out a warning.

I've been fighting with this for more than a half hour. Apparently I can have either normal spacing or bold font titles but not both. ARRRRGGGGHHH.

Michelle

I've been playing with the new editor, just to get a feel for it. For those of you experiencing the You have an opening ... without a closing ... error, it's pretty easy to see what's going on, if you hit the HTML edit button.

If line 1 is bolded, and line two isn't then what you want to see is this:

[b]line1[/b][br /][br /]line2

What you don't want to see is this:

[b]line1[br />[/b][br /]line2

See the difference... the line break is inside the bolding. That's really an error on the editor's part. And hopefully it'll be fixed.

The good news is that it's easy to fix this ourselves. You can use the HTML editor to move those symbols around, then hit "update". Or, you can use the highlight text and hit the bold button method but you have to be really careful to include only the text in your highlight, not the end of line character (the extra space at the end of the line). I've been playing with this for a while, and it seems to work.

Pretty? No. But at least it works.


eta: I've only played with typing directly into the form. I haven't played with cut & paste yet. That'll be tomorrow's task.

Whew!!! What an unpleasant experience. It took me 40 minutes to post a simple review of a garden bean!

First I tried to copy the Word Document as described in the instructions. All that weird spacing. No matter how I tried to correct it, nothing worked.

Then I translated my entire review into HTML. I kept receiving the infamous error (and my HTML was perfect):

You have an opening B without a closing B
You have a closing without an opening

After fudging with this review posting for way too long ... I finally was able to use the Word cut-and-paste feature. However, I had to eliminate all wording in bold font and type them in capital letters instead for emphasis. For some reason, this also helped with the spacing in the review.

I think I've earned a good night's rest! :)

~~ Dawn

Edited to Add: It's the next day ... and everything is working great. I wrote another review in MS Word, and used the Word button to copy-and-paste my review for posting. The text formatted beautifully (bolded headings, proper spacing, links). This is fantastic!!!!!!

I HATE THIS THING.

I quit. I'm posting my reivew in it's craptastic form. I'm not going to wrestle with this @$*^@#(!*&@# thing for another 20 or more minutes.

If my DELETE button breaks in the future for trying to delete all the random added extra spaces or trying to find HTML that ISN'T THERE, Epinions has to buy me a new freaking keyboard.

Once again I would like to know why Epinions is putting out things that don't work...

Huh. I haven't had that problem - and I've been playing for an hour straight, just trying to get a feel for it. Can you email me the html source... I'll be happy to take a look. (Sometimes four eyes are better than two).


eta: That is, tomorrow I'll be happy to take a look. Off to get some shut-eye, now.

I thought I had this thing down but I just can't get rid of html codes because of spacing and bolding.

I'll have to simply do it without codes until this all "clicks" in my mind. I have to try and get five more reviews up for this month which would not have been a problem until this. I could have had two of them finished tonight. I don't have many more hours off work till the end of the month. Poor timing for rolling this out if you ask me. I suppose I can dress up my reviews once I get the hang of this.

I wonder how newbies are doing? Probably OK because they aren't getting involved with B and I yet.

frustratedpops

If we have an editor now, why don't we try writing directly in the Epinions box now instead of in Word or in some sort of Text Editor?

You can always copy and paste back into Word.

I had zero problems, but I always use the Epinions box when I write reviews.

I figured it out from an earlier post here...there is a boo boo in the code making the error. It didn't work even writing directly into the new editor. It come up as the error...b without a / b.

So I hit the html button, searched through every word until I found it, corrected it and submitted. The second review, I deleted all html and did without. Too much trouble to go through so much text to look for the error which wasn't even my fault. I didn't forget to put in the ending / b, the editor did. Hope that makes sense. Hard to search out the issue when I am not doing the code myself but the editor is! Eyestrain!

Will that error be fixed? Seems it isn't just me but everyone having the same error happen.