Most curious user interface. Site disables keyboard. No go. (archived into a thread initially posted in 2012)

I'm a former en/ru/commons editor, came here after seeing Gmeijssen's notice on ru-wiki. Let me tell you, the "usability features" of this site exceeds the worst of expectations.

I'm writing this in an external editor, to be copy-pasted in mediawiki's edit window. Why? because the site disabled typing Latin characters and most of punctuation marks. The OS, of course, switches keyboard layouts as usually, but all Latin characters typed in the window are converted to Cyrillic gibberisch. Even Latin comma is rendered as Cyrillic б. Four tildes are rendered as ЁЁЁЁ. Right, my IP geolocates to Russia, but even Russians need commas... sometimes... they really do. And then there are Chinese, French, ... - just stuck in here. Don't they need commas, too?

Oh, yes, there's a "Language" selector on top. I managed to switch it to English after around ten failed attempts. It turned out that choosing the first meaningful option (US-EN) is a dead end that redirects to all-Russian. The EN-EN worked, thank you.

78.107.117.194 11:12, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Hello, we're very sorry that you found it so difficult to edit, this is not how it's supposed to work. First, this is enabled by default only for languages which have defined an input method, and it can be disabled in the preferences. Second, I've just tried to set my language to Russian (both as a registered and anonymous) editor, and I was able to write normally: what you described happened only if I explicitly set "русская стандартная" instead of "Немецкий" in the "Метод ввода" menu, and I was still able to disable it entirely by unchecking "Для переключения метода ввода (Ctrl-M)". I believe this is how it's supposed to work, perhaps it depends on your browser? Which browser are you using? If it's too hard to use this website, you can file it as a bug on bugzilla:. Thank you, Nemo (talk) 20:51, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

--- This message is an archive of an old message posted and replied in 2012, that remained at top of the talk page.