Issues with Editor and Posting

[brenx10]

Having spent quite a bit of time troubleshooting this I am sorry my subject line is so vague.

The issue my forum (vBulletin 4.1.5) is having is one I've seen a ton of threads on but unfortunately none of the solutions out there worked for me, and none of them listed all the issues I am experiencing, so here's a breakdown:

1. The CKEditor toolbar does not load in Quick or Advanced mode; intermittent at first, eventually missing for everyone (something cached?)
   • The smiley's box loads, but clicking on a smiley does nothing (smiley codes work if typed manually)
   • BB code works, but only if typed out manually (hotkeys like CTRL+B don't work)
2. Posts are treated as plain text. Carriage returns / new lines are all merged into a single (wrapped) line.
3. HTML and BB Code HTML as an option is disabled on all forums but HTML is enabled/allowed everywhere for anyone (bad!)
4. Editing posts in quick editor displays a blank screen, but the text is there.*
5. Autosave is not working.

All of this suggests a change occurred, but to my knowledge nothing has. This all started about one week ago, and by the end of the week it was happening to everyone from any machine. The toolbar and buttons appeared and worked on some workstations up until the end of this past week, which to me suggests a feature of the forums that will cache on the client machine.

I've tried all of the usual fixes: disable hooks (via config, via admincp), set mobiles styles to none, replacing the ckeditor.js with a fresh version from the vbulletin package, confirm Enhanced WYSIWYG is enabled everywhere (admincp, user settings), create new style with no parent, try all existing parent styles, set SKIP_DS_ERRORS, changing the editor to Standard, etc. I even tried installing a third party plugin for enabled the advanced editor anywhere, and while that displayed the smilies in quick mode, no toolbar showed up. I uninstalled it.

I can open a support ticket for this, but was hoping there might be more recent knowledge (all existing threads I found were 2+ years old) to assist.

Thanks.

[Mark.B]

Hello

Pin the first instance, you'll need to upgrade to 4.2.4.
4.1.5 is obsolete and there have been many security and bug fixes since then. Because of that, we cannot really provide support for it.

[brenx10]

Ah, I see, ok. I'll talk that option over with other staff on my forum and see what they think.

For what it's worth I checked another forum I visit that uses the same version (where theirs is working) and found that my forum is not loading anything after the "textarea" tag; so sub-tags like the section below never show:

<span id="cke_vB_Editor_QR_editor" class="cke_skin_kama cke_1 cke_editor_vB_Editor_QR_editor" dir="ltr" title="" lang="en" tabindex="1" role="application" aria-labelledby="cke_vB_Editor_QR_editor_arialbl">

[Mark.B]

You could look at the version of php the server is running. If the host has upgraded it, then your version of vBulletin won't be compatible. Only 4.2.3 and 4.2.4 are compatible with php 5.5 and 5.6.

[Paul M]

......... set SKIP_DS_ERRORS

JFYI, SKIP_DS_ERRORS is only relevant to vB4.2.2, it wont do anything in 4.1.5.

[brenx10]

Thanks. I wasn't paying too much attention while troubleshooting. Just trying whatever I could find. The forums are on a dedicated server that I manage, so the PHP version hasn't changed in a couple years. Apparently our setup is "incompatible" but has worked fine for... two to three years now. Until last week that is, haha. Anyway, looks like my only option right now is to upgrade, so I am going to download 4.2.4 and start planning the upgrade.