Q: Why does Mac OS spelling correction not work in the communities editor?

My Mac's display is broken so I cannot test under (near) your conditions...

I do not experience speelling dictionary problems in Firefox on my borrowed Dell/Win10 laptop

That said, everything that you experience on a thread page is happening pretty much "client-side" computing - that is, a BUNCH of scripts and such load up while the page loads, and everything thereafter happens on your Mac

IF this happens intermittently as you are apparently describing, it could mean that the "line of communication" between the source (Apple) and you is only working intermittently

OR

There really is some intermittent problem with your installed dictionary (weird, but possible I suppose)

Troubleshooting?

• Same as with any other issue - restart your Mac - which will of course restart Safari = test
• Restart & test in Safe Mode > OS X Yosemite: Start up in safe mode
• Restart in normal mode = test
• Test in another browser such as Firefox, Opera or Chrome

OK.

My test of your New question issue

Booting in safe mode would hardly be appropriate for a browsing error.

Your Original Question specifically mentions Mac OS spelling correction...

"  Why does Mac OS spelling correction not work in the communities editor? "

Troubleshooting steps remain... try them or not as you see fit

The Mac system spell checker went away in the ASC text posting windows when the underlying forum-driving software changed to Jive from WebCrossings in April 2011. Oddly enough, the OS spell checker works when you use secondary text boxes like the one used to report posts.

The situation has remained unchanged for five years so I don't expect to see improvements unless Jive steps up to the plate. It has been mentioned by the senior contributors here hundreds of times but apparently our good Hosts are locked out of the fix process for this issue. Just one more of many glitches that came with Jive at no extra cost.

I have been living under a rock, I guess...

I could swear that I remember speel-chicking in the TinyMCE pane when on my Pismo, Tiger, TenFourFox

- I am resisting hooking the poor thing up to my TV as the display is now broken by a fat person's behind to test my memory

Jive has spell-checking--it just doesn't work consistently for me on a variety of computers, including Windoze boxes. It commonly fails to flag misspellings unless one forces the search with command ; (semi-colon).

I was using a G4 MDD running Tiger when the April 2011 change to Jive happened. With WebCrossings, these forums ran fine on the old box. Jive was so much more resource-intensive that, six months later, I had to buy an Intel Mac or give up working here due to Jive not being PPC-friendly. Can;t complain in the long ru because my i7 quad-core iMac is still a screamer--it's just I wasn;t quite ready to buy a new computer in 2011. Thank goodness for the Apple refurb store! Sanve me close to US$600!

Sad news about the old laptop, I always admired the quality of the displays; they were IMHO quite nice for their time.

To be clear... "Jive" does not have a rich text editor - it adds on TinyMCE, and my bet is that ASC's AppleJiveWare does NOT have the latest-greatest version of Jive much less that of TinyMCE's "Premium" version within

TinyMCE | Features for WYSIWYG HTML Editing

https://www.tinymce.com/features/

I do not recall speel-chicker failing with any regularity here. If I *did* experience it, I would likely not worry much - OR - restart the browser

My best guess is that the "browser's" speel-chicker is what we all see here when editing - not Jive/TinyMCE.

Firefox automatically checks the spelling of words that you enter in text boxes containing more than one line. As soon as you finish typing a word, it is checked against the words in the installed dictionary. If the word is not found in the dictionary, it will be underlined in red, as in the following example:

[above emphasis is mine]

How do I use the Firefox spell checker? | Firefox Help

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-use-firefox-spell-checker

Thus my trubble-shouting step of trying different browser(s)

Again, a best guess is that OS speel-chicker has nothing to do with the OP's issue

added

OR... Safari relies upon OS X speeling dikshunary (???)

OK.

I'll bet that if you had MS Office running it would use MS Dictionary (99.99% sure of that)

This is not the first time we have seen oddball behavior of Safari and Apple web pages

One thing is certain, the TinyMCE editor is NOT using its own SpellChecker because that is only available in the "Premium" version of TinyMCE - JiveSoftware version is at least two full versions later than we use here

I have not used Safari in over 10 years - too many folks developing browsers as their main business