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I guess it's just that people aren't familiar with Markdown yet, so it's going to take a while before people realise what is going to happen when they have multiple ` in a line, or multiple * in a line... i.e. strange mysterious things.
Would it be possible to reduce the markdown that is processed to the most commonly understood and accepted subset - e.g bold, italics, m-dashes, etc?
Markdown wasn't a particularly good choice for a social forum. That you are forced to learn the Markdown syntax in order to avoid your text being marked up is a fundamental usability issue. At least with bbcode you need to explicitly mark up your posts in order to style them. You can't do it by accident. Markdown might be popular among geeks but it isn't suited to general purpose posts by a non technical community.
bq-
Markdown will remain fully featured, we do not wish to deviate from the commonly accepted features of Markdown and to introduce a new flavour different from everyone else's.
Markdown was chosen because:
- It is the easiest to format on mobile devices
- Avoids the need for a WYSIWYG tool that would break on most mobile devices and be fragile on others
- The HTML produced is great for the email notifications, which means they better represent how the comment is actually rendered
- It allows us to accept emails authored using Markdown (and with email quoting
>working in all email clients) so that we can add obviously missing functionality like replying to notifications via email and having those replies end up in the right conversation, messages, etc - It actually is more universally understood than Wiki markup, BBCode or HTML... because Markdown stems from email and doesn't require specialist tags (outside of links which I still think are quite horrible)
The issue (if that is even the right word) with Markdown on LFGSS comes from people being very conditioned into how vBulletin and their flavour of BBCode operated. It's more about unlearning, and using plain text, than learning something new.
That said... we still support BBCode, so as long as you use minimal plain text to format your comments then there is no issue.
Of the 15,000+ comments since the switch over, only a couple have been badly formatted when newly authored, and about 10 have been badly formatted when trying to quote older hybrid and complex BBCode comments (big lists with lots of quotes and links).
Given we've just changed the input syntax, this is an incredibly low error rate.
I disagree with your view that there is a fundamental usability issue, and with most of your post TBH. It's not even true that BBCode was fully explicit, given that some things were automatic (linking, inheriting formatting including bold, italic, etc from pasted text, and so on).
- It is the easiest to format on mobile devices
Velocio
From a Markdown perspective, that is code.
The real issue is that someone is using backticks ` as apostrophes.
Or their keyboard is doing this. That kind of thing used to happen all the time when Microsoft Word was the editor of choice for email(!).
I guess it's just that people aren't familiar with Markdown yet, so it's going to take a while before people realise what is going to happen when they have multiple ` in a line, or multiple * in a line... i.e. strange mysterious things.