Hey everyone,

With the creation of Side 7 v5, I decided to try using Markdown as the formatting markup of choice in an effort to make things simpler for site members to format posts and such. Unfortunately, that resulted in things being more confusing for people, especially when it comes to the syntax for single line spaces, and presented issues with the inconsistent way in which the editor presented the formatted text VS the way the site rendered it.

That is being remedied with the next site update.

I am updating the editor to one that saves formatted text as HTML instead of Markdown, so text renders more accurately and consistently. Your older entries that are still in Markdown will still render as they do today, but all new entries going forward will be saved as HTML, not Markdown.

Here's where things get a little messy. If you edit an older entry that was saved as Markdown, the new editor will not recognize any of the formatting and will just show the raw text as a single block of text. The editor has no HTML to format off of, and therefore it just appears to be completely unformatted to the editor. I have researched almost a dozen editors, and they all do the same thing.

So, to recap:
Pros: consistent formatting between the editor and site rendering, new features like emoji selections, more formatting options than before
Cons: Editing older, Markdown-formatted entries will be unformatted in the editor

What are your thoughts about this issue? Is this a huge issue for you? Is it no problem?

Thanks!
-- BK

As long as existing formatting is grandfathered in, that clears the highest hurdle. CivFanatics tweaked the back-end at least twice since I've been a user and while basic formatting remained intact, certain character codes (em-dashes, foreign symbols) broke, sometimes with no visible traces, and the Xenforo migration didn't translate table syntax to a usable replacement. (And the less said about dA Eclipse, the better.)

There are two points I'm unclear on:

1) Is Markdown still valid as input? It's not clear if this is a wholesale sunset, or the updated editor can still translate the syntax to HTML.

2) Is the issue with editing old posts that the markup is stripped entirely, or just that it's laid plain and has to be manually reformatted? The former would be tedious, but not unmanageable—I already weathered it mirroring upload descriptions from dA. :P.

The main advantage of Markdown is its shorthand, but if a return to an HTML base opens up the possibility of a WYSIWYG live editor, I accept it as a necessary sacrifice.

For the sake of maintaining the ability to render older entries, Markdown will still be supported. The editor does not strip it out, it just displays it as plain text (including the Markdown tags) unformatted.

While Markdown is a great shorthand, and is still going to be usable, the editor itself will save the text as HTML, not Markdown. Please note that the Markdown used in the editor will not render as it does with the current editor. But, it will be rendered out when the web page the post is on is rendered.

The reason I'm making the change is because there just have been so many issues with the Markdown, whether it's inconsistent rendering, or people not understanding the syntax, or in some cases certain Markdown tags not being supported (I'm looking at you strikethrough). Not to mention the current editor trying to turn @name tags into Github links in the preview. So...

But, I have one other question to add to the conversation: Do we want this new editor added to the forums posting screen?
-- BK

So basically, a backwards-compatible refactor that improves stability, expands versatility, and is essentially unnoticeable on the front end. This is literally the best result I could have hoped for; I'm not sure why there's even a debate.

Yes, please! The forum architecture is different from the galleries, probably owing to its use of BBCode, but I'm surprised a "widget" editor wasn't already in place. The current method always felt like a stopgap, and has the issue where going back to revise the draft puts the timestamp out of sync with when the post actually goes public.

Pull the trigger. Posts, journals, bios, comments, forums, DMs.. apply the change every where. A little bit of a mess seems acceptable if it means that HTML will be supported (again?). I vaguely remember a time when I posted my art here with HTML formatting, and then all of my old submissions got broken when the Markdown formatting was implemented. It was ugly and annoying, but it wasn't the end of the world to edit them. People can always delete and resubmit their work if they want to keep a consistent theme throughout their gallery— I'm not saying that it would be fast, easy, or fun, and the loss of comments/favorites/views would suck, but it's doable. It might be a rough transition for some people, but it's a necessary change overall. Growing pains, 'n'all'at.

I've been picking up on HTML when posting on other 'sites, so I think I'm prepared to deal with such a change. I won't deny that it'll be a pain, but you won't hear me complaining about it. As you said, the older stuff will maintain their formatting as long as we don't go in and edit it. I can see myself probably making changes to a few older posts after the switch, but I doubt it will be a significant hassle. Let 'er rip!

Technically HTML support never went away. There is a limit on what HTML tags can be used, but you could hand-code HTML still. The big change is here is that the editor will no longer save things as Markdown, but instead will save it as HTML. Overall, cleaner, and yeah, there will be some growing pains but it's relatively minor. I just want the membership to be aware.

-- BK

Fortunately, with the editor, you won't need to know HTML. You will edit your text in a rich-text editor, and the formatting you do will be saved as HTML for you.

-- BK

Aaah, okay. Sounds good!

The only major reason I can think this would cause significant problems is if it altered literature formatting, but that text already edits as HTML so it shouldn't be affected.

+1 to porting the editor to the forums.

DO IT