[they’re coding bugs …]
With the release of our new and improved Chat Text Box comes the coding critters of the dark---bugs! 🐛
Here is a long and detailed article to satisfy and answer your curiosities of what is currently happening with this really cool box.
Bugs to Squash To-Do List:
Here is the list of known bugs that we will be working on removing in the coming updates:
- Pasting in a lot of emojis/mentions all at once can be slow
- Emoticons do not auto-convert to emojis
- Clicking on a mention does nothing
- User discriminators are shown in the mention tooltip in streamer mode
- Manually typing out an emoji, emoticon, or mention will not convert it to the "rich format"
- Starting a message with /, @, or s/, and then using auto-complete will insert a mention as <@userid> instead of @username#id
- Discord ignores backslashes when parsing ``` when calculating whether the cursor is currently in a code block or not
- The tooltip for the character counter, the text for the upload modal, and the text for the setting to disable the new chat box are not translated
- Leading whitespace is often ignored for markdown syntax highlighting. For example “|| text||” will not put a background color on the first 5 spaces there
- Clicking away from the editor and back into it on Firefox will move the cursor to the beginning of the text box
- Users who have modded their client to enable the “isStaff” flag will not have the new chat box enabled
Not Bugs:
In the meantime, here is a list of behaviors that may seem like a bug, but are not bugs. They are unlikely to be fixed and are working as intended:
- > and >>> behave the same way
- Links are not clickable
- Links won't show URL encoding or other modifications that appear after sending the message
- Typing slash commands like “/spoiler” or “/me” does not show a preview of the styled text
- The backticks show inside of the background color for inline code blocks
- The character counter may slightly miscalculate the length of the message. For example, if you type “/spoiler foo”, it would count that as 12 characters, but when sent is only 5
- Hitting backspace after a mention deletes the entire mention
- Creating an empty code block by putting a space between the two sets of ``` symbols
Bugs That Will Live:
Lastly, here is a list of identified bugs that are considered relatively harmless and will remain in coexistence with the app:
- The rich chat box is turned off on the Android browser and in certain old browsers (such as Edge <= 18)
- Multi-line bold/italics/underline/etc does not get styled
- In compact mode, RTL messages have a line break between the author's name and the message content
- You cannot use triple-click to select an entire line of text when that line contains an emoji or mention
- Inserting an emoji and then wrapping that emoji in an inline code block or multi-line code block will not down-convert it to plain text
- Typing two regional indicator emojis will not combine them into the corresponding flag emoji
- If you hold shift-enter to make the text box scroll, the editor will not be scrolled entirely to the bottom (but the last line of text is still visible)
- Syntax highlighting in code blocks is turned off on the last line if the closing backticks do not end on their own line
- If you mention yourself it won't highlight the message with a yellow background
I Found More Bugs!
If a bug needs to be escalated to the Wizards for bad behavior, it would be extremely helpful to include the following, since often these bugs only reproduce on very specific setups:
- Browser and browser version
- Operating system
- Discord release channel
- Discord build number
- Keyboard layout (meaning US/French/Chinese/etc)
- The language they are trying to type in
- What you are trying to type
If you are unable to type something in a non-English language due to a bug, please follow the instructions below:
- Go to: https://danburzo.github.io/input-methods/index.html
- Clear out the "Simple DOM contenteditable" section
- Click "Clear Log"
- Start a "Screen recording"
- Type in exactly what they would type in to Discord that causes Discord to break
- Stop recording and send it to us, along with an explanation of what is different between the behavior on that website vs Discord
This tool records everything you are typing, so it both demonstrates how to reproduce the problem and what is supposed to happen, and your explanation at the end should confirm how Discord is broken.
How Do I Turn this off?
There is an option to turn off the new chat box! It will only show if users have access to the new chat box though, which currently means only Canary & PTB users on the latest release will see it.
We are using this as a temporary option though, so that users who are stuck can turn it off, but our hope is to fix any major blockers so we can remove this option in the future.
Please send all reports of new issues with the new Text Chat Box to Discord Testers or dis.gd/contact and we’ll do our best to help out.
Happy bug hunting!