forum.dlang.org, version 2 (BETA)

[sigod via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 12:57:23 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 1. People receiving messages through NNTP/mailing lists will 
> not see the formatted Markdown.

That isn't a problem at all.

> Although Markdown's goal is to be readable in its plain text 
> source code, it still allows many situations in which the 
> source is misleading or difficult to understand. For example, 
> special characters need to be escaped by a backslash, which can 
> create confusion in the presence of other special characters. 
> (Are they part of the D syntax the user is describing, or 
> something else?) Some syntax such as tables or images can also 
> be not very readable in source form.

I cannot speculate about it without actually trying to implement 
it.

> 2. How should we render messages sent by NNTP/mailing-list 
> users?

Why should we?

> Do we just assume that they're sending Markdown and render it 
> as such?

Yes. You already do it for quotes.

> This can cause the messages to appear broken to forum users.

Yes, it can be a problem. But, first: markdown render should be 
optional. And second: don't render if you're not sure how to 
render it.

> 3. There is no unified standard for Markdown. The original 
> format is not used on major sites today - StackOverflow and 
> GitHub extend the format, and users will expect Markdown with 
> those extensions.

There's always should be a help which explains what supported. 
Also, I don't think we need _all_ syntax and all possible 
extensions. Just those which will improve readability.

> 4. Markdown's formatting for code (leading whitespace) is 
> rather cumbersome

I dislike this syntax too. GitHub's extension:

```[language, optional]
<code in here>
```

Is much better.

> , and difficult to use without either visual JavaScript text 
> editors (as on SO) or Markdown extensions (as on GH).

You already have `Save and preview` button.

> 5. You can't edit posts once sent. This means that if you 
> accidentally messed up the formatting (e.g. you pasted code 
> without padding it with whitespace or surrounding it in 
> ```...``` blocks), you can't go back and edit it now.

I'm aware of that. As I said before: "don't render if you're not 
sure how to render it".

> You see this all the time on StackOverflow (even though it's 
> user-editable) and more importantly on the vibe.d forums. It's 
> pretty ugly

It all depends on actual users. We can't do anything about this.

> 6. How do we encode that the message is in Markdown in the 
> message's headers?

Again. Why should we? See #2.