forum.dlang.org, version 2 (BETA)

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 13:31:05 UTC, sigod wrote:
> 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.

I don't know what you mean by this. I provided several examples 
of situations in which problems can occur.

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

For one, sending the same text will change its appearance 
depending on which client you use to send it. Copying text 
between posts can drastically change its appearance to the point 
of corrupting it or making it unreadable.

This reminds me to another problem with Markdown: you can't copy 
rendered text, paste it in your message, and expect it to display 
correctly. The forum does not have this problem with quote 
margins (there are invisible "> " characters which will be copied 
with the post), but it is difficult to extend this all the way to 
Markdown formatting.

>> Do we just assume that they're sending Markdown and render it 
>> as such?
>
> Yes. You already do it for quotes.

The quotes are part of the formatting that all clients are 
already in agreement with. It is part of RFC 2646 and others. 
Markdown isn't.

>> 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.

We definitely should not expect users to choose how they want to 
display others' posts.

And, please elaborate on "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.

Few things turn me down from making a first post on a forum more 
than having to read a "How to format your post" page first.

> Also, I don't think we need _all_ syntax and all possible 
> extensions. Just those which will improve readability.

Great, so another Markdown variant.

>> 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".

As above?

>> 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.

Blaming the users never works. If you start blaming users en 
masse, you've become blind as to how crappy your UX is.

>> 6. How do we encode that the message is in Markdown in the 
>> message's headers?
>
> Again. Why should we? See #2.

1. The forum needs to recognize which messages are 
Markdown-formatted somehow.
2. Text must be sent in such a way as to maximize readability in 
other clients.