[Forum] Drag Drop Interface to CKEditor is Broken

[tommythejoat]

Users with tablets and other "modern" devices expect to be able to use drag and drop from their file system to upload images to the Message Board. It would be nice if this created an attachment or uploaded the image to a file and linked it with the IMG bbCode.

However, what it actually does is appear to place the image in the post but instead drops mime base64 encoded blob into the post. If the editor is in WYWIWYG mode they see a small image symbol and when they click save, they see nothing in the post display. If they are in source mode they see the base64 text string which may be a few hundred thousand bytes.

This does not happen for all users and seems to be browser related. Firefox and Chrome are most likely to exhibit the behavior.

On my standard Windows 7 laptop with Firefox 31.0 I see a forbidden symbol if I try to drag an image into the CKEditor window. On my new touch display running 31.0 under Windows 8.1 the broken drag drop behavior is seen.

I would like to have a feature for my tablet and phone users who would love the drag and drop. Failing that I would like to protect my system from these huge file drops that really mess up the forum performance. Of course they also spoil the experience of using our system for newcomers.

[Wayne Luke]

It isn't that it is broken, Drag and Drop isn't supported via CKEditor in vBulletin 4. The only protection is to educate your users that it isn't supported.

[tommythejoat]

I think you have not thought this through.

If it is designed to allow a naive user to accidentally insert multiple 750kB chunks into a post without knowing what is going on then that is a severely flawed design. Your education suggestion is not possible to implement. It is not our regular users who have the problem it is 3 or 4 thousand who are excited about their new iPad or other device including many new laptops that provide this behavior on the client side which is a real problem on the server side.
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We have no means to educate them in advance. The presence of these huge mime blobs severely impacts the performance when displaying threads.

If you have no intention of fixing it, I will have to fix it myself. Will I be able to get any help finding out exactly where I should recognize and delete the mime object?

[Mark.B]

This is not a feature of vBulletin 4, and would require custom coding to implement.

You would need to ask on www.vbulletin.org, the modification site.
Chances are you'll need to put in a paid services request, as I doubt anyone will put the work in for free.

[tommythejoat]

You are probably right. However, in a year or so when all the vB4 boards are being buried by invisible images hidden in posts it might get more attention.

If I knew for sure where it was I would try learning enough Javascript to fix it. There must be paste and drop events in the client script for the Editor that could be used to disallow the action if the object were base64 encoded. That is all it would take to prevent the substantial harm this non-feature will do.

[Mark.B]

I'm sorry, the support teeam cannot tell you this, as we are not programmers.
CKEditor was altered and customized substantially to work with vBulletin.