The most recent Discourse update, 3.4.0.beta2-dev, was applied on Sept 29 by our remote host admin; the last time our most regular cut/paste from Word user had it work for him was late on Sept 27.
I myself have no trouble with cut/paste from Libreoffice, but I don’t use Word at all; several of my users do, a lot, as it’s a writing site and we mostly work on our own systems and copy/paste big chunks of text to share with each other, from time to time.
Pure text copy/paste, often fairly large chunks 1000 - 2000 words.
The only recent change to the site (other than the update on the 29th) was to change the number of consecutive posts a user can make, from 5 to 15.
My most technically adept user says the last update to his Windows system was on the 18th, and the problem didn’t start until after the 29th.
Edit: I went looking for anything that might have to do with content extension filtering, and my site is using the default list of what’s allowed, I haven’t made any changes to that at all.
I then filtered the settings search on “paste” and found this:
Enable automatic HTML to Markdown conversion when pasting text into the composer. (Experimental)
which is enabled by default, so I disabled it. I’ll check with people who use Word to see if that lets them paste as before.
Well, indeedy, Ctrl-shift-V does work, but why a silent change to such a widely used, habitual key combination?
I could see adding the new key combination, but not silently subtracting the old one that’s in such wide use. I mean, I know there’s a huge raft of changes to flag, so I understand it’s hard to decide what to call out as a major change… My bias towards using keyboarding commands is probably showing.
Im not sure the change is related to Discourse. It could be related to specific Word documents. I have read various sources on the internets talking of Word copy/paste behavior which could include images in pasting.
What’s odd is that I’m not hearing that people are doing anything different from “what we always have done” – but I wouldn’t put it past Word to have made an invisible change like that, either.
I suppose it doesn’t seem like a big deal to add an extra key to a key sequence, but when you’re a touch typist churning out massive lots of words, little things like that do make a difference to the flow of thought. Kind of like all the curbs in town suddenly growing a half inch taller and you keep stubbing your toe on them, after 30 years of them being reliably the old height.
I did read something on the copy paste from Word. Ie one paste/copy option pastes plain text; while the other option will paste with outputting to hmtl format.
MSWord has been known to change things in the UX with people complaining as they are used to older layout. It is indeed annoying & frustrating when DeVs try to reinvent the wheel needlessly with the idea it will improve flow; once you’re used to the new way.
