The unreasonable brittleness of the contribution submission interface

This is really infuriating.

Try and submit a new puzzle. Take your time, make it a good one. Research it, test it, not only for your puzzle author’s solution’s correctness, but also for any pitfall that a beginner could encounter while solving it. Verify the edge cases, test against the constraints, adjust them to make them a more natural fit.

Then submit it. Oh, but make it realistic. Your cat might have distracted you, or maybe there was a subtle earthquake at the same time, anything. Just misclick the submit button by a few pixels, no need to aim for anything fancy. Or press escape, that works too.

POOF

It’s all gone. No confirmation. No way to bring it back, be it by attempting the browser’s back button, or hoping for some angular-style caching that would make it pop back when clicking the Contribute button again.

Who in their right mind thought that was reasonable UI design?!

MISCLICKING IS NOT AN ACCEPTABLE SUBSTITUTE FOR AN ACTUAL CANCEL ACTION.

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Oh, by the way.

This is from a different-yet-related section of the site. Could you guess with 100% accuracy what each button does?

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I experienced such annoying accident so many times and glad to see someone speaks up.

Another inconvenient “feature” is that there is no way to insert a set of test case into the middle of an array of existing test cases, nor is there a way to remove a test case in the middle unless you manually copy-n-paste everything below it to climb one step up.

While busy doing copy-n-paste it is often the high time for the miss-clicking accident to happen.

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As we are on minor little but annoying things:

  • The F# code generator on loopline is wrong (always takes input.[0], not input.[i]).
  • When you want to edit your lengthy comment on a pending community puzzle, there is no scrollbar - so I end up using an external editor to edit my comment
  • Solution upvote/comment link: when you solved a puzzle in more than one language, the link brings you to the wrong solution, so you have to click through all your solutions on that problem to find the comment.
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Thank you for bringing this up.

The editing pop-up thing will disappear pretty soon as we’re making a few changes to make it possible to create multiplayer/opti contributions.

I’ll also make sure that we improve the other things you brought up.

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