Forum:Problem with Character Infoboxes

The Harry Potter Wiki is having an annoying issue involving its character infoboxes. Whenever somebody edits one using the visual editor feature, the "name" field is removed from the infobox, resulting in " " being displayed instead of the character name. We had thought that the solution would be to get Wikia to disable the visual editor (which has also been the source of a number of other headaches on the wiki), but Wikia refused to do it, citing some nonsense about it being an integral feature, even though major wikis such as the Final Fantasy Wiki and Memory Alpha have had it disabled. So my question is - does anyone know of any other way to sort this problem? It's aggravating having to go back in and restore the name each time this happens, and sometimes the problem on a particular page slips by for days or weeks if nobody catches it. ProfessorTofty (talk) 03:54, October 23, 2012 (UTC)


 * You could try sticking the  magic word in the infobox template. That will disable the Visual Editor, it should work to disable it on every page that includes the template. Alternatively, nested templates will reliably break it and force it into source mode always:


 * Just create a Template:Dummy which has nothing but a single space [bar press] in it then stick the Dummy-Dummy in the page and it should break the VE ("Rich text editing has been disabled because this page contains complex code") Lunarity 04:29, October 23, 2012 (UTC)


 * That's a great idea. I'm going to try that and hopefully we'll be through with this issue for good. ProfessorTofty (talk) 01:33, October 24, 2012 (UTC)


 * It's not working. I tried both methods and it still brought up the visual editor when I went to edit a page that had that template on it. It's Template:Quidditch player infobox that I tried on over at the Harry Potter Wiki, if you wanna have a look and see if maybe I was doing something wrong. ProfessorTofty (talk) 01:43, October 24, 2012 (UTC)


 * Note: I would advise against using complex code (Lunarity's ) as a means to disable the visual editor on a page, as it's poor style and makes the source code unnecessarily complex. The   magic word is the appropriate way to disable the visual editor on a page by page basis.


 * With either of these methods, you need to put the code on the page itself. Putting the magic word (or complex code) inside the template will disable the visual editor when editing the template itself, but will not disable the visual editor on all pages where the template is transcluded. If you want to disable the visual editor on all pages where a template is transcluded, you need to edit each and every one of those pages and place the magic word at the top of them.


 * I was afraid that was going to be the case. That could be well over 1,000 pages, but I suppose there's nothing else for it. Okay, thank you. ProfessorTofty (talk) 18:07, October 24, 2012 (UTC)