What are workarounds for common glitches on WikiAnswers?

Answer 1

It depends what glitches you mean.

General User Tips

1. Sometimes when you hit the 'submit' button - the screen seems to freeze, and won't let you refresh it. You can get around that by clicking the little blue arrow to get to the question page and enter the answer directly.

2. If you try to edit a question and the option to save does not appear, you can click the end of the text and hit the Delete key. It doesn't remove anything, but the Save button appears.

3. If you have trouble getting the spacing between paragraphs right, highlight everything and then add bullet points (or numbers). Then turn the bullet points (or numbers) back off. After that, you can fix the spaces between the paragraphs. A good time to use this fix is when doing an edit after a merge. Otherwise, you'd have to save twice. So if something is going to eat the spaces, you can use the bullet points to provoke the problem before you save, making it possible to only have to edit and save only once.

4. If you make a change that doesn't take, please avoid the temptation to repeat what you just did. If the servers are seriously lagging, repeating what you did could cause unintended problems, such as duplicated questions appearing on the site and as alternates, which could in turn cause additional problems. If you have accidentally created duplicates during a system lag, please tell an Advanced Supervisor or a Community Assistant so they can delete any duplication.

5. If you see dashes or the word "answer" as leading text in answers showing underneath questions, that means the answer was saved with the old editor. In that case, edit it, fix any spelling or grammar, and save as minor. That will delete the leading, unnecessary characters, even if they do not appear in the new editor. If there is nothing else wrong, just click edit and immediately save as minor edit.

6. If you see an answer with underscores between half the characters, you can usually safely delete the underscored section. That likely is duplicating an unformatted section, but check to be sure. This is caused by a glitch in the old editor.

7. Use 3rd-party tools when necessary. When working with huge lists of words and phrases, you will need to use external web tools. You can search for alphabetizers (which often include a tool to remove duplicates), capitalization tools, etc. If you have a paid Grammarly account for other reasons, you can use that to check for grammar problems and plagiarism. Currency converters and mass/weight converters always come in handy. Windows Notepad can be used to remove formatting problems and for replacing characters.

Supervisor Tips

1. Supervisors who have problems removing a category from a question might want to try trashing and untrashing the question, then categorizing the question.

2. If you notice that trashed questions have flags, you should untrash and retrash the question. While you could just unflag it (even visiting the question can unflag it), that could miss the underlying problem of the question being stuck in a "limbo" state where it is sitting in a trash category but is not considered trashed by the site. If that is the case, then the question will still be visible on the site to all users, and able to be edited by all members in good standing. So it is important to make sure it is properly trashed and not just listed as "Added" to the trash category in the logs.

3. If you see inappropriate questions being recommended as related questions to view, and they are listed as Uncategorized, they could be botched trashing attempts. So it is best to trash those when you see them.

4. If you see alternates that are exact duplicates of other alternates, the main question, or other questions, then you should either tell an Advanced Supervisor or Community Assistant, or delete them if you have the ability to do so (Advanced Supers).