Well I, for one, am certainly not downloading a new browser to my
computer just to accomodate this one site. I think it's incumbent
upon the situation to be fixed. I grant you, it sounds like it's not
easy, and I actually DO sympathize. But there was a time when it was
working pretty darned good (sometime in the distant past). Why did it
change? Er...no need for a history lesson though. That was more a
rhetorical question than not. Nevertheless, as we all seem to
acknowledge, a fix is needed.

Good luck with that. We
anxiously await something which will end the frustrations we fan
writers feel.

Well, what part images have got to play in a Fanfiction is beyond my
comprehension, to be honest. Images are just there to make the
fictions seem longer.
For Fan News, I can understand it.

I know FCK for even longer that Spaw editor, the problem with it is
that it didn't allow to upload pictures directly. (I don't know if
it's possible now) Also, the design is pretty awful (looks like windows 95...) and can't be changed (as far as I know)
I have already considered the possibility to
add another text editor (like FCK) and offer the possibility to switch
to one from another in case of problem.

EDIT : I have tried the demo page, and apparently there's an option for uploading pictures, although it doesn't seem to work (not even an error message when trying to uploading something)

Disregard what I said above above making a new editor. May I recommend

FCK Editor?

http://www.fckeditor.net/


How to use: http://docs.fckeditor.net/FCKeditor_2.x/Developers_Guide

It's a lightweight editor
that is powerful enough to handle loads of text. If it would be
effective on BaltoSource is behind my comprehension, however.

[Edit]: This code could need a bit of tweaking in order to work properly, but I take it you will notice if anything does not work beforehand.

Strangely enough, I can't use it properly with Internet Explorer, and
Firefox tends to bug it.

In IE, the lineshift doesn't
work properly, and it can change lines when you push enter by a
random number of 1-10 lines per push.
On firefox, the
type-indicator (that little | ) doesn't appear correctly, and when
trying to put in texts from a .docx document, you can lose about a
page of it (as you mentioned above), although I have never had this
problem myself. There is an update to the editor, however, that I
might suggest you add (on the very page you linked), and after trying
it out, it seems to be working fine.

As you also said,
Word adds a lot of unnecessary html tags, indeed. But if the editor is
incapable of handling long texts very well, it is most probably not
worth using. I will look up on some php scripts myself, and see if I
can provide with a more stable WYSIWYG editor.

About the
scripting mistakes, I was multitasking at the time, and trying to
formulate a rant about the banning system (which also needs to be
upgraded), and was thinking about two things at once... it happens to
me T_T Edited it away. (man, I need to learn to look over my
posts).

Anyway, as I said, I'll play around with some
scripting and see if I can give you an SMF-like editor. Those are quite powerful and can easily handle large blocks of text =)

Anyhow, the aforementioned browsers should cause little trouble with the editor as it currently is.

And the editor works perfectly with IE and Firefox :

http://www.spaweditor.com/

(I would be curious on what "scripting mistakes" you're
talking about)
Although it seems to have some difficulties with
very long text, but any WYSIYWG editor has the same problem.

When I make a change on the site, I'm not always aware that it can
break something else, which is probably what happend for the covers
not displaying and the link for offline reading.
As for the
fanfics cut into several pages, this is VERY difficult to do it,
because this is HTML code and there can be MANY different sources
(some of them, Word for example, add so many useless tags to their
HTML, that it can display entire pages of nothing like you
experienced.) I'll try to figure out possibilites to correct this, but
it's not as easy as pushing a button.

Sorry for the double post, but from my experience, these browsers do
NOT fix the problems with the covers. It's something Steet needs to
fix as well.

I can possibly shed some light on the matter.
It is a rather
lesser known issue that the editor is not very functionable with
Internet Explorer, while it still doesn't work properly with Firefox either.
I have some browsers to recommend for this,
although I am not quite done testing them yet. First is Safari:
http://www.opera.com/

This one is more advanced and has less bugs than Safari and
Firefox, but doesn't work very well with flash scripts and some
javascripts. However, by my experience, it should work fine with the
BS editor as well, with minimal glitches.

Note: I am not
entirely done testing them yet.

But currently, there is no real estimate on when this will be fixed (nor has Steet given us any either ;]).

I hate to add this (thought about making it another question, but
didn't want that one to be deleted as "repetitive")...but now I'm also
noticing that it is impossible to now opt for the "download and read
offline" option in fan fictions (any). Also, anyone (including
myself) who has posted a cover picture on their fan fictions will find
that the pictures do not appear ON the covers. Only on the preview
list.

Uh, are we gonna solve THIS at least?