Text Keeps Getting Deleted As I Type
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Howdy folks, I’m trying to write a blog post, but over the last few weeks, when I’ve tried to do so, I’ve encountered a frustrating issue. As I type in a text block, what I’ve written will suddenly get erased, replaced by what I am currently typing, as if I had selected the entire thing while I was typing. This seems to have something to do with the autosave feature, as it seems to correspond to when the draft is saving my changes.
WP.com: Yes
Jetpack: No
Correct account: YesThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Okay, I’ve discovered that this is happening because I’m hitting backspace while still holding down shift, which apparently is a hotkey to delete an entire block. Is there any way I can disable that? It’s infuriating.
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Why should you hold down shift and hit backspace in the first place?! This is a build-in feature of the wordpress.com platform – https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/keyboard-shortcuts/ – which won’t be disabled for only 1 person.
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Ha, I’m certainly not doing it on purpose, but apparently it’s a keystroke I unintentionally make quite regularly as I compose, hitting shift too early or too late as I’m moving into deleting something or about to start writing again. My fingers outpace one another. In most word processors, it has no effect, thus I have never encountered it anywhere else and have never had this quirk cause me problems.
And, no need to be snippy. I asked if there was a way that I could disable it. Obviously they aren’t going to change their feature because I have a typing quirk, but the effect is still really annoying to me, so I was hopeful there was some level of customizability there. I can’t imagine I’m the only one with clumsy fingers that has encountered this issue with WordPress.
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You can’t change or disable those keyboard shortcuts as they are part of the wordpress.com platform
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I’ve been having a similar issue over the past few weeks, and I think I just figured out the cause. Sadly the arrogance and rudeness of @staartmees here and on another similar post is serving to make me think as quickly as possible how I can move away from WordPress and onto a different platform because I’m not interested in being part of a “community” that looks down its nose at users experiencing difficult and confusing problems.
My problem sounds very much the same as yours, @bentongrey, except in my case I could be absolutely certain that my fingers were nowhere near the delete key as the random deletions of text were occurring. In my case I figured out that occasionally while typing quickly on a MacBook keyboard, I would be accidentally hitting cmd-X, which is of course the normal system shortcut for the “cut” operation. Most sane apps expect you to select something before you cut or delete it. The developers of the WordPress editor have decided it is more convenient for users that this operation will cut the current paragraph without it first being selected. That’s what I would call a shitty design choice, but I’m sure the developers have reason that for some users it makes sense.
In my case, it only appeared to be a new problem because I recently switched from using a Windows laptop – where the ctrl key is safely in the far corner of the keyboard – to a MacBook, which has command right next to the keyboard and under the X key, therefore quite easy to mash these two by mistake when typing quickly. That combined with shitty WordPress UX, which doesn’t give you any visual indication of what just happened, made it look like the editor was broken when in fact it is just behaving “as designed”, at least according to someone’s idea of design.
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Interesting. I switched back to Windows and found myself having the exact same shift-delete issue that @bentongrey reported above – I *did* worry earlier that it wasn’t just a MacBook thing, that I had more than once had to deal with the extreme frustration of my text suddenly disappearing while editing posts on Windows too. I too like to type quickly which means I’m not always 100% accurate which means it’s surprisingly easy to accidentally still have the finger on shift while moving to delete a character. Jesus, that’s an awful, awful UX choice, especially when you can’t turn it off, and especially when support requests are met with rudeness and contempt. Going to go off and find out whether Umbraco has embraced the same level of stupidity and hostility…
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I just want to add to this– maybe, as staartmees has said, a feature won’t be changed for one person, but I feel like this has to be something that has affected loads of users. It’s actually really easy, I think, to be mid-sentence, about to type a word that has a capital letter, and then, a hairline later, hitting Backspace without having completely let go of the Shift key yet. In-fact, I just made that mistake as I typed “Shift” just now. How often (another interruption– I just made the same mistake again trying to type “How”) does a person need to delete entire paragraphs in a single keystroke, anyway? Typing takes a long time, I don’t see how users are clamoring for a way to quickly delete everything they just spent hours writing. I think it’s dangerous. I’ve lost a lot of stuff when the Undo button hasn’t worked correctly. At the very least, make it a keystroke that people are less likely to do on accident, like Shift-Control-Delete.
It’s gotten so bad that I’m actually solving this problem for myself by drafting my posts in Blogger, which maintains all formatting when copied and pasted in WordPress. So yes, that is my solution. Not using WordPress to write. : ) Just to post afterwards.
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I’m definitely not hitting shift and backspace at the same time and this happens to me nearly every time I write a post on my WordPress.com hosted blog, and does not happen to me ever on a Lightsail hosted WordPress instance. So this is specific to WordPress.com, I have talked to their support team about it and sent a video where it seemed like it was due to my connection to a VPN, but now it’s happening when I am not connected to a VPN and I’m basically 1 more instance of it happening again before I cancel my WordPress.com account and host WordPress myself because this is, quite frankly, totally ridiculous. I’ve had it happen probably 10 times now, it’s a nightmare and completely unacceptable for WordPress’s flagship hosting to have such an egregious bug in it, for months now.
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I’ve emailed Matt Mullenweg directly about this. If I was the owner of a SaaS writing product and I found out that our product was deleting people’s writing, I would make sure fixing it is priority #1, so hopefully he’ll take the issue seriously and make the rest of the team take it as seriously as it should be taken. None of us, especially loyal and paying customers, should feel like we can’t actually write directly on our WordPress.com blogs.
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Hi, all! Thanks for sharing this information with us. We have reported this to our team and escalated it. Once we have an update, we’ll share it here.
From what you’ve shared here, it sounds like it might be a keyboard shortcut (Shift + Backspace), but we’re investigating it thoroughly. If you have any other details or videos showing this behavior, please feel free to share that with us here.
If you see or add a topic that you know needs staff intervention, you can add the
modlooktag to the topic to make sure a staff member sees it. I’ve gone ahead and added themodlooktag to this thread so we can be notified if any additional information is shared here. -
Same. It can happen with backspace, space, delete etc. Their Hotkeys are useless 99% of the time. The one hot key that I use, isn’t by choice, but bad design and its this one. Maybe allow us to just disable the hotkeys all together rather than force it.
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Sorry to add a second comment. Hitting Backspace twice to delete two letters in a row too quickly, also deletes the entire paragraph randomly sometimes too.
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Hey folks, thanks so much for the much more helpful and thoughtful responses! I knew I couldn’t be the only one encountering this. I hope we’ll see a way to deal with this issue, as it really is quite frustrating.
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On the 5th, I got a new response from WordPress.com support.
I’m writing to follow up with you about the issue you are running into with paragraph blocks being deleted. Our team is still looking into this, as the fix should have been included in a recent update. I don’t have any additional details at this time, but I’ll keep you updated as we continue to work on this.
I haven’t tried writing a new blog post on my WordPress.com blog since the 27th, but I’ll circle back around when I hear more or I feel like it’s been fixed for me in some way.
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Hi @bradleyroot and @arumarvorheez,
I can confirm that some users are still affected by this problem, and our team is still investigating.
Thank you for your patience!
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Even if you fix the “glitch” that’s making it happen more often, it would still be super-helpful if shortcuts could be completely disabled for users who don’t want them on. There are plenty of times where I’m about to write a word with a capital letter at the beginning, then I press the Delete key because I wrote the wrong letter, or I want to change the words I wrote. (In-fact, I’ve done it at least five times while writing this.) I assume at this point, you don’t want to change any shortcuts to less common combinations, but I feel like a disable shortcuts button would be a really, really helpful feature. As I already mentioned, I’ve completely stopped writing my blogposts ON the actual WordPress system– I just copy-and-paste them in from Blogger, which is a really sad state of affairs.
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