Issue when uploading content

  • 11 July 2021
  • 8 replies
  • 90 views

When I am trying to upload an article to the knowledge base it gives me: “The content is empty or too short” and doesn't allow me to continue.  Any idea what am I doing wrong? 


8 replies

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Hi there @Idan !

That seems rather strange and I’m not sure we can do much here since it seems like a possible bug. I’m going to ask @Julian to escalate this to a support ticket in Zendesk for you - you should get an email with the details once that’s been created.

The only other thing I can think of is whether there’s actually any text in what you’re attempting to upload. But that’s about the best I can think of.

Hi @Idan. I agree that we should raise the topic as a support ticket, which I have done. Support may have additional questions to follow up on. 

 

@Blastoise186 I am your number one fan, and I’m here to tag team questions together! Julian has been dedicating more of his time to our customer base, outside of the community platform. Please feel free to tag my name where you think I can help! :grin:

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@Idan Any chance you’re copy/pasting from word? That’s been our general issue when we run into errors creating articles. 

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Any chance you’re copy/pasting from word? That’s been our general issue when we run into errors creating articles. 

Now that you mention it @Kgastaldo , that makes perfect sense! I have indeed seen this exact issue before elsewhere - it’s also been known to affect phpBB due to the use of BBCode in the default editor as well. Which is the same kind of BBCode that inSided has deprecated for the most part - and is another good reason that justifies why inSided are in the process of removing BBCode support outright.

Microsoft Word is quite fancy in the formatting and other stuff that it silently adds to pretty much everything - such as Smart Quotes that put quote marks at an angle rather than being straight. Froala Editor and CKEditor 4/CKEditor 5 (along with TinyMCE) can handle this reasonably well when BBCode is disabled, but with BBCode parsing enabled, such fancy formatting chokes the editor and causes issues like this one. There’s a few potential solutions/workarounds here:

  • You disable all fancy formatting in Microsoft Word for everything you plan to post on inSided before you write any new documents, then re-enable them afterwards. Not ideal though, especially for having to repeatedly flip the switch!
  • You transfer the content to something like Notepad or WordPad and then save it there before transferring it from Notepad/WordPad to inSided - a little painful, but my recommended option as it helps to “clean” the content of Word fanciness.
  • inSided completely and permanently disables ALL support for BBCode for all content going forwards - but allowing BBCode to remain for existing content provided it doesn’t get edited. One for the long term, as inSided are still working on this iirc

I hope this helps @Idan .

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  • You transfer the content to something like Notepad or WordPad and then save it there before transferring it from Notepad/WordPad to inSided - a little painful, but my recommended option as it helps to “clean” the content of Word fanciness.

Yep. This is exactly what we do! Thanks for being much more thorough than I was!

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Hehehe, no worries! My own account on Zendesk only has Customer permissions, meaning I only have access to my own stuff (yep, I really do have a support account too!). It’s amazing how one can get a support account with inSided despite not actually being a customer. :stuck_out_tongue:

I can’t access the escalation as a result, but I know that Tom and Oliver check this forum as part of that process, so there’s no doubt they’ll spot the comments that were left after the escalation was raised.

I just so happen to recognise this bug due to the fact I’ve used phpBB before (only as a user!) and that particular forum software makes very heavy use of BBCode. I’ve probably used forums that run on it for maybe 10 or 15 years now, at a rough guess? But yeah, just about any BBCode enabled editor really does choke very badly when you try to throw stuff into it where fancy things have happened externally. I think the way that Word tries to be helpful causes some kind of conflict in that  Word does things that BBCode either can’t parse properly or just completely chokes on. After all, Word is designed to be WYSIWYG (just like CKEditor, TinyMCE and Froala Editor in their default configurations) while BBCode is more of a code based thing that’s similar to HTML, albeit a little more flexible, user friendly and locked down than regular HTML. There’s never usually any kind of built-in BBCode tags that could run arbitrary user uploaded scripts for example (that would be really bad for security!).

You can’t easily mix the two however I’m afraid. I’m pretty confident that inSided might be able to do something about this to help mitigate the issue, but strictly speaking, it would ultimately mean nuking BBCode support and only having WYSIWYG as that’s the only way to completely resolve these kinds of conflicts. As much as I’d liked to have suggested an alternative solution because I know a few people who use inSided that are completely devoted to using BBCode exclusively (I will admit that I much prefer WYSIWYG), there’s no other solution that I know of.

@Jeanie Lee does that make you even more of a fan? You’d better watch out as I’m completely shredding that leaderboard right now - and Daniel has told me of your point stealing strategy! XD

In a way, it’s kinda lucky that I’ve got experience with various different forum software and forum platforms, because it’s purely for this reason that I eventually managed to recognise this issue as being related to known issues with BBCode in general. You can of course still use Microsoft Word to draft articles, but you’ll just have to make sure to “clean” them with WordPad or Notepad for now.

@Blastoise186 When I see you in the forums its like I’m seeing my favorite wrestler enter the ring in 1995. :rofl: (The best days of my life) I don’t have as much community or product knowledge as Julian and Daniel, so I have to get my points somehow! 

Adding to the thread, had the same issue (copied and pasted from Outlook).  Oddly, the issue was the image.  Removed it and I was able to Publish, then hit edit, did a screencap of the image and pasted that in just fine.

Normally, these show up as “Too large”, not too small!

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