Forum:Request disabling automatic use of VisualEditor

Although we are presently discussing a policy to prevent forced features, I feel we should also draft a separate request for Wikia Staff to disable use of the VisualEditor on this wiki by all people.

When VisualEditor was announced, I was optimistic that it would fix many of the nagging problems present in the Rich Text Editor (aka the WYSIWYG editor), such as the addition of blank lines, breaking of complicated templates, etc. Before VisualEditor, we could force people to edit in source mode by adding __NOWYSIWYG__ to especially sensitive pages, but VisualEditor simply ignores those tags.

Right now, the Visual Editor is disabled by default for registered users, but it can be enabled in each person's preferences. However, it is enabled by default for all unregistered users. This means that any page that an unregistered user can edit which has complex code can be broken by that user, even if they don't directly edit the "complex" feature. This is apparent on our Battles page. It would be highly detrimental to semi-protect that page and other pages simply because they contain complex text. So, our only options left are to appeal to Wikia Staff to disable default VisualEditor use for unregistered editors on the wiki, to semi-protect all "breakable" pages on the wiki, or get used to having to constantly clean up after the collateral damage of this latest experiment.

Therefore, I am requesting that we contact Wikia Staff and respectfully ask them to disable VisualEditor for anonymous users on the wiki. --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 22:48, July 5, 2014 (UTC)