Rango's Dog House

Facebook is totally broken but there’s nobody home. It’s not because of the coronavirus, these problems have existed for years, but who do you contact? Have you ever heard back from Facebook support? They have never responded to me once in 12 years.

I’ve been uploading videos recently. If I view my profile page, then navigate to More => Videos I am served a page with two tabs on it.

The first tab is “Videos of You”, all the videos I’m tagged in which includes all the videos I’ve published there since I always tag myself, as well as a random assortment of videos I’m tagged in for some peripheral reason.

The second tab is “Your Videos”. And that tab is completely empty. So I go to edit the videos and I’m no longer tagged. I dutifully tag myself again, make sure it has a Title & Description, save and it seems to work. But it doesn’t. The second tab is still empty and when I edit the video again it’s lost my changes.

I don’t know how long that’s been broken, is it broken for the rest of you? We’re all on different versions of Facebook at any given time called flights, which they use to evaluate new features and bug fixes to limited samples of users.

Another thing that’s extremely broken is Copy/Paste between personal pages and groups. Let’s say you prepare a thoughtful post with an introduction to your music and then paste the song lyrics along with the link. Looks fine on your page, all your formatting is retained.

Only ten people will see your post so you head over to your band & paste it there. Looks fine, maybe ten more people will see you unless you pay them money. Better to try your luck in the Facebook Groups where everybody ignores everybody else unless it’s a Writer’s Group then all they do is insult each other and never post any writing.

So you go to a Facebook Group and paste it into a post there and it’s a complete mess. Your formatting has been eviscerated into something with Paragraph markers, your line by line lyrics have been collapsed in groups of two, and the spacing between lines is completely different. So for groups you have to re-paste your lyrics in underneath your intro, then it works.

Aha you think, I’ll just copy it from the Group post editor window. Edit => Select All => Copy. Navigate to another group, Paste. Totally screwed up again. It’s been broken for over a year, possibly two. It used to work. I fail to understand how a company with virtually infinite test resources can have some common use cases in a constant state of failure. What else are they working on? Those bugs must be truly awful for these simple user scenarios to remain untended for so long.

It’s all a moot point. Right now I can’t even paste into Facebook Groups at all. “Something went wrong”. Oh really because things were working so great before.

And it’s not just Facebook. I just tried to paste this text into the new WordPress Block Editor. It made a complete hash of it. No spaces between any of the paragraphs. All my double spaces have been converted to single spaces. I tried to insert a blank line and it was huge, like two font-widths high. Because it’s a different block.

How ridiculous, WordPress is a site for writers and they can’t handle a plain text Copy/Paste operation. I switched to the Classic Editor, then one that works and pasted my text into there. All my double spaces were collapsed into single spaces but the line spacing between paragraphs was smaller than the Amazon so I’m cutting my losses and getting on with my evening.

I was about to tab back over to Facebook when I got a pop-up from WordPress. They will be replacing the new editor with another new editor on June 1st. My question is how do I get back to the old school editor. The one where Copy/Paste worked like it did for the last 40 years.

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s another moot point. Because if you can’t support such a simple keystroke convention and don’t have the means to detect the mess you’ve made during your test automation and user acceptance testing you’ve got bigger fish to fry.