Board Thread:Administrative Discussions/@comment-1824272-20141111210154

Aces,

Over the past few months, Wikia has been testing a new VisualEditor to replace the aging editor. Essentially, when you go to edit a page, there's three modes of editing:
 * Source - This isn't what the page will look like; instead, this is the source code with all of the wikitext and the coding for the page. This is my most preferred editor, because it gives total control.
 * Rich-text - This is what the page will look like... kind of. Rich-text, also known as Visual mode, has never supported templates or galleries, and honestly I really hated it. It needed an improvement ever since it was introduced.
 * VisualEditor - This is that improvement. This editor will show you what the page will look like 99% of the time, and has a much more modern interface of editing.

Over the past few months, VisualEditor was in a "beta" testing stage. While it was in this stage, anonymous contributors (the ones with IP addresses who have not logged in) were set to have VisualEditor as their default editor, but could access source or rich-text by clicking the arrow next to the "Edit" button. Wikia administrators also had the option to put this on the members of the entire wiki, but I did not opt for this because I felt that most of Acepedia's members have been here for quite some time and have not experienced VisualEditor at all.

However, a change has occurred that requires the attention of every Wikia contributor: VisualEditor has been taken out of beta testing stage. What does this mean for you? It depends. '''Go to Special:Preferences and click on the Editing tab. You're looking for "Preferred editor".''' I'm going to quickly explain what each option does:
 * "No preference" - This option is being removed. If you are set to this option, you will be moved to "Wikia's new VisualEditor" (see below) in the very near future.
 * "Wikia's new VisualEditor" - This is not changing. - Clicking "Edit" on an article will take you to the VisualEditor. You can also click the arrow next to the "Edit" button to bring up the extra options which includes "Classic editor", which takes you to the classic rich-text editor (or the source editor if the article has complicated formatting).
 * "Wikia's classic rich-text editor (where available)" - Clicking "Edit" on an article will take you to visual mode. You can also click the arrow next to the "Edit" button to bring up the extra options which includes VisualEditor. However, if an article has complicated formatting, you will be forced into source mode when clicking Edit. Since the rich-text editor is being superseded by VisualEditor, my suggestion to everyone in this mode would be to change this setting to "Source editor" or "Wikia's new VisualEditor". However, this option is not changing, so you are still free to stay here if you so wish!
 * "Source editor" - Clicking "Edit" on an article will take you to source mode. You can also click the arrow next to the "Edit" button to bring up the extra options which includes VisualEditor.

That's the summary of what's going on. If you'd like to try out the new VisualEditor, feel free to do so on Acepedia:Sandbox. Please make sure your "Preferred editor" is set to what you want, and if you have "No preference", please change it soon so you're not taken by surprise by the new VisualEditor when you go to edit a page.

Thank you for your attention, and happy editing! 