Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

Oh my goodness, I created a list!

Precisely why Markdown is joyous... you meant for a list to exist, and lo it does.

As for the points you raised:

Why is the font size so large?

For readability and also, history.

The default font size used by older forums was 10px, this is from software 14 years old, circa 2000 when vBulletin and phpBB first emerged.

Over the many years between 2000 and 2014, lots of things happened:

• Devices got bigger screens
  
• Devices got much higher dot per inch screens
  
• "Retina" displays and +240DPI (dots per inch) screens emerged
  
  

Back in 2000, 10px was relatively the same size as this is now... it was readable when you sat at a normal distance from a screen.

Back in 2000 the screens were such low quality (low DPI) that to even think of using a serif font for body text was out of the question, and sans-serif fonts ruled... with Arial and then Verdana ruling more than anything else.

The font choice suited the capabilities of the devices and their screens, they focused on low-DPI, low-resolution, bad font hinting, bad font support... they attempted to make text readable given an extremely large number of constraints conspiring to make blocks of text unreadable.

Then, for every year that devices improved, that DPI increased, that screens got larger... the software didn't change, and relatively the fonts appeared smaller.

Over more than a decade people just leaned in closer, squinted harder, and adjusted to miniscule fonts on ever larger and higher resolution screens.

The iPhone "Retina" has been out for 4 years... meaning almost every iPhone and iPod now in use is a high-DPI device.

The Android devices followed quickly, and almost every Android device still in use is a high-DPI device.

Most laptops sold within the last 4 years have an adequate or high DPI. Most monitors sold within the last 4 years have an adequate or high DPI.

All TVs sold in the last 5 years have a higher DPI (HD), newer TVs and monitors are going 4k and even laptops are appearing with super-high DPI screens.

Typography on the web was finally in a place where good looking fonts, at readable sizes could be used.

We may be one of the first forums to use a highly readable font at normal size, but we aren't the first or only website to do so.

All Wordpress ship with default themes using a normal font size that is similar to ours. Wikipedia uses a normal font size (though ugh, they still use sans-serif for massive blocks of body text, stretched as wide as the screen... hundreds of characters per line). News sites like The Guardian, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal all use normal font sizes for their body text and comments.

In fact, we're quite far behind the curve on returning to a normal font size. Yes, we're way ahead of other fora software, but we're behind nearly all blogs, news sites, information sites.

Lost context when quoting

I do agree with this, but I need to make a safe way to allow quoting. If I give you the raw Markdown of the quoted post it opens up a security risk, and if I give you the HTML we produce it's complex babble to read and edit.

I'm going to look at using a JavaScript HTML to Markdown converter that would allow me to quote a post, and convert the safe HTML back into Markdown that could be put into a post and be quoted, chopped up, etc.

Searches and code

It's not code, they are just keywords and options. Just like Google allow you to search by site site:lfgss.com, by file type filetype:pdf and by various other options. So we allow your search to be further specified to your needs.

You can restrict a search to a forum forumId:531 or by who authored some comment or content authorId:47686, or you can find just events type:event.

Not that you need to memorise these things, late last night I added the search forms in the right hand bar for search just a single forum (it adds the forumId for you and sets reasonable defaults to make search easy), and for searching within conversations and events.

But if you want to do some really crazy searches beyond the capability of the convenient forms, if you want to "Find all posts made by Bob between January and March, within the Current Projects forum, in which he mentioned Demon Bikeworks"... then you can, because we have provided support for all of the options and more.

We chose to do it this way, because the approach other fora have taken doesn't really work well when the forum gets big and complex, and when you start adding other types of content.

vBulletin has:

• A search form
  
• An advanced search form
  
• A profile search form
  
• A private message search form
  
• A thread search form
  
• A forum search form
  
  

Crazily, they all do different things and show the results in different ways, and they're a confusing mess.

XenForo is a more recent forum software provider, and yet they still have 4 main search forms (all different in functionality), and a separate private message search.

We just have one search form. It searches everything. Whereas others have built a search form for every type of thing, we built a Google search for forums.

Yes it's different from what forums have used to date, but we really feel it's better in so many ways. You won't have to memorise "code", but we will show and allow you to edit all of the keywords that a seach uses.