Problem with previewing

February 8, 2006 6:56 PM

MeFi Bug: Preview posts.
posted by five fresh fish to Bugs at 6:56 PM (10 comments total)

Upgraded to Opera b9. Disabled JS for metafilter.com, so as to avoid the spellcheck.js delay and the preview function.

However, now I see only a "Preview" button and clicking apparently posts instead of previews.

Could be Opera b9 has a button-rendering bug, or it could be the changes that led to Preview and Spellcheck farqued the button functions on non-JS browsers.

Oddly, Preview here in MeTa appears to function just peachy.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:58 PM on February 8, 2006

Associated: is there anything we can do about that spellcheck.js delay? Sometimes MeTa pages just hang whilst trying to contact whatever external server it's hosted on - when this happens I have to disable js to even view MeTa pages.
posted by blag at 8:21 PM on February 8, 2006

is there anything we can do about that spellcheck.js delay?

See here. No real resolution in that thread. Contact null terminated for advice, maybe.

I still block it because I don't use spellcheckers because I'm so cockeh!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:40 PM on February 8, 2006

I can remove the spellchecker. It's nice, but does add a delay.

So fff, did you just have problems on metafilter, not metatalk and not ask mefi?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:25 PM on February 8, 2006

I made a small change earlier today but just rolled it back. Let me know if you still have problems.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:42 PM on February 8, 2006

Why can't there be a copy of spellcheck.js hosted on metafilter.com? That would presumably pretty much eliminate the delay. Sure, you'd still have to connect to spellcheckthis.com if you actually wanted something spell-checked. I had a quick look at the js source, and it the license bit doesn't seem to say anything about not being able to do this.
posted by matthewr at 5:51 AM on February 9, 2006

Also, could the delay be reduced by moving the script tag down from the head element where it is now, to below the comments, which would hopefully make browsers render the comments before going off to spellcheckthis.com? Mucking around with firefox's Edit HTML thingy, I made a local copy and the spellchecking still worked after being moving the script tag.
posted by matthewr at 6:05 AM on February 9, 2006

matthewr: "Why can't there be a copy of spellcheck.js hosted on metafilter.com? That would presumably pretty much eliminate the delay. Sure, you'd still have to connect to spellcheckthis.com if you actually wanted something spell-checked. I had a quick look at the js source, and it the license bit doesn't seem to say anything about not being able to do this."

At first I wasn't sure you were right, but I just checked the source too, and you are. It's a BSD license, so Matt could make a local copy, or do really just about whatever else he wants to with it. The only reasons I can think of to link directly to spellcheckit.com are 1) so Garrison Locke (the author) gets usage stats, and 2) so updates to script go live as soon as they're made.
posted by Plutor at 6:45 AM on February 9, 2006

Actually, spellcheckthis.com (got the domain wrong before) isn't owned by the original author. The original site is here. And what's on spellcheckthis.com is a modified older version (from December) that requires permission from the site owner.

Matt, you should use the original (and more up-to-date) package unless there's a reason you're not.
posted by Plutor at 6:49 AM on February 9, 2006

Mathowie — problem is now fixed on all subsites. Thx!
posted by five fresh fish at 9:23 AM on February 9, 2006