Why is my EDITBOXHEIGHT preference ignored?

Recently, I found that this was ignored from my user preferences page:

   * Set EDITBOXHEIGHT = 55

Checking my spelling vs. the documentation seemed to indicate that my spelling was correct; and, after all, it worked last week, why does it fail this week?

I was led a merry chase trying to figure out why, including examining default preferences, user preferences, FINALPREFERENCES, and various macros that attempt to help with debugging.

Now that I have found the answer, I am posting it here for benefit of anyone else doing a google search on terms such as these:

• foswiki preference EDITBOXHEIGHT
• failed fails error ignored wrong adjust adjusted default bigger smaller too big too small

The answer is that if you have touched the little arrows below the edit box:

then a cookie is written with the height that you adjusted it to, and your user preferences are silently ignored.

Firefox shows me that there is a cookie called

   FOSWIKIPREF 

and after deleting it, the EDITBOXHEIGHT preference works as described in the documentation.

-- JohnHenning - 21 Oct 2013

Commenting is disabled while not logged in