Hehe, is that "big brain" term like "you're bad!" meaning really good. It has so many layers of bloat that the module creator has no clue as to what's going on underneath.
it looks to be a complete ground up tutorial on markdown. I guarantee you could find several quick references on the subject with a few google searches.
Oh the editing this morning (Oz time) was sooo painful. It stopped responding many times for what seemed like minutes (probably 30s). IMHO this needs to be priority #1. If this cannot be resolved then this software or hosting needs replacing. No point in continuing if the basics cannot be fixed.
in the meantime, I think many of us just want the BBS code returned. Markdown seems like a kludge using backticks, asterists, etc. At least [ b ] and [ /b ] were somewhat intuitive, and we had the little icons to click on. At least we can continue on with our posts. Not being able to format your posts and do partial quotes is a real game changer. Hopefully going back here is easy and gives us time while the fundamentals are fixed.
The visuals are good enough. Room for improvement absolutely. But we need go back to basics while the fundamentals (speed and response) is fixed.
The editor box should now work without the cpu freeze issue. Please road test and let me know if there are any technical issues with it.
Notes:
Quoted links have the "click to follow" disabled at the moment, and is on the list to improve.
@Duane Degn Images should be showing inline. That link you offered in the first page of this thread appears OK. Are there any other posts you could offer an example which have an issue with the images not showing?
The rest of the items on the list will likely have to wait for a month or so. We need to wait for the full stable Vanilla release, and some database updates, before proceeding further. Otherwise we will have a mess and be chasing in circles.
Once the software is available we can plan another weekend of updates, and perhaps include some styling things too. To that end, we do have a much better search feature (which was active here the last week or so) and a theme chooser for user profiles. Neither will work in this transition, and seemed less important than the stable editor. I feel like all these things will be back online in 4 or 5 weeks; seems like the perfect moment to go make a P2 Edge with 32MB of ram !
The only exception might be spin code highlighting. That would be nice to have sooner. If time allows I'll update everyone for sure!
ps. There are some styling options available in a popup menu, if you highlight a section of text whilst posting.
I wasn't really affected by the freezing (well, maybe my Wii doesn't explode after a minute now?), but the code block cursor jumping thing is still happening, which I think is related to high CPU usage (I think the jumping is related to language detection - to figure out which language a code block is, it has to try parsing it with every loaded language and then it keeps the one that generated the most keywords and modes)
No, the front page used to treat announcements like regular threads, they just appeared when they had new replies. Now they are always on top. The P2 forum is announcements only now, you can't actually see any normal threads without going into the category page. To add insult to injury, the "more discussions" button that'd take you to that page is gone.
You can click the form headings to go to that category.
Yeah, I can see the more... link below gets floated on some of the groups. Should be able to bring those back today. The headings could do with hover tags too.
As for the annoucement behaviour; will investigate.
The forum is also slow, kind of. Paging up/down or using the mouse wheel feels unresponsive. The screen real estate is wasted as well (30% of the left section is blank due to the menu etc at the top), with the zoom level I need for text. I have to go page after page to figure out what I haven't read yet. Right now this is not a happy place to be, it's tiring to read. It's a relief to move to forums using e.g. Discourse. Or nearly anything - minus vBulletin, it's got too many problems, but at least even that one is easy to read and use.
Paging up/down or using the mouse wheel feels unresponsive
That's an issue with your computer/browser, I fear.
The screen real estate is wasted as well (30% of the left section is blank due to the menu etc at the top), with the zoom level I need for text
Depending on your screen size and desired text size, try zooming a bit more than you'd actually need. There's a media query that kicks in when the screen is narrow that makes the sidebar go away.
@VonSzarvas said "Are there any other posts you could offer an example which have an issue with the images not showing?"
Here's an older post with broken images. Two images which were attached to the post show up only at the bottom of the comment. I had originally inserted these images inline. I also had inserted a couple images from other forum posts.
Links to some of the older forum posts work in the above linked comment. The working links are ones I manually edited. One link I didn't fix uses the text "Hex Caster board" in the link.
Here's a post with broken images. This particular forum thread has lots of images. Some of the images seem to be fine while others don't appear. Post #1 and post #9 have images which appear to be fine. Post #4 of the same thread (the one linked earlier) doesn't have any working images. Post #20 of the same thread has a mixture of both working images and broken images.
The broken image uses IMG tags. The image which works correctly uses ATTACH tags. I wonder if I can get the other image to appear using ATTACH tags?
(This is where it would be nice to have a preview.)
The forum home page shows the ten forum sections, and below each section heading are 5 threads with title and summary.
The summary includes view counts, comment counts, started by, and also lists the section name, like "Announcements".
But since the section name is already prominently displayed right above the thread summaries, instead of listing the section name, why not show the timestamp of the latest comment? I think that would be helpful.
OK, understood. Those are database issues which I intend to get sorted in the near future. There's a whole bunch of urls from at lease two forum versions as I can see, which were never converted at the time of the various forum updates. My intention is to put these things right, so thanks for the examples that I can follow.
Just saw a weird thing about the "more discussions" link: apparently if there are un-dismissed announcements the link doesn't appear, as soon as you dismiss all the announcements (and refresh the page) the link appear again.
Have any of the dev team tried to add a CODE block using Markdown on an iPhone? I ask because the (`) character is buried deep in the alt keyboard a few layers. Its literally a minute to type three of these in a row on an iPhone.
Maybe it would be possible to map three of its inverse twin (‘) to mean a CODE block? Those are easily accessible on the keyboard. Food for thought...
I’m not feeling the love here either @Cluso99, but it sort of looks like we are stuck with it. Sort of like having a non-fatal disease: we just have to learn to live with it the best we can and adapt. Dog knows I’m trying... :)
None of this should be construed as criticism toward Parallax or @VonSzarvas. Seems they got handed a short-notice turd and also had to adapt.
Markdown is modern and is used in a lot of places (github, discord, wiki's, and so on), bbcode is ancient and dying out.
That said, this editor is not a good example of a markdown editor. It needs an edit source mode at a minimum, "wysiwyg only" sucks and this one has serious issues. That is not a fault of markdown, just this editor implementation.
Italics... You need to surround the text with underscores
Bold... You need to surround the text with a pair of asterisks
At least [ i ] and [ /i ] and [ b ] and [ /b ] made sense. Underscores and asterisks are likely to be present in any text.
How do those BBcodes make any sense? (unless you know a bit about the underlying HTML...)
Whereas Markdown formatting is intuitive, since it's just how most people would convey alternative font styles in a plaintext environment. (In that sense,markdown is readable without actually rendering it). Also, they only count at the beginning or end of a word, not inside a word and not free-standing. I find it is rare that it gets in the way. Maybe with programming symbols that start/end with underscores, but those semantically belong in a code block.
Additionally, I find it more comfortable to type it out along with the text, less characters and no need to bend my fingers into origami to reach the square brackets and whatnot (perhaps less of an issue on US layout).
This however, is not markdown, this is bad WYSIWYG that pretends to sometimes understand some Markdown-isms. I literally cannot type something that'd false-positive as italics into a code block because the editor is stupid and thinks to convert it into italics. _RET_ <- There we go, that was an ordeal. A real Markdown editor lets you type first and asks questions later.
It actually makes sense, if you were around when messages were ascii text, wysiwyg editors were a myth and people used to highlight words with asterisks and underscores.
For what is worth, I find quicker to make a word bold with asterisks than trying to find what code makes it bold today.
Just noticed that quoted text can't be edited ... bad!
There are plenty of shortcomings as this is no longer supported by the provider, but if the majority agrees this is the editor to stick with (as long as possible), then I'll put some time into improving it.
Things like the default code button behaviour (inline vs codeblock), @ detection of usernames in the codeblock, visual style of the codeblock content, quoted panel needs to be height-limited, etc.. leap out, and no doubt other things will present themselves!
We will stick with markdown, because we cannot guarantee this plugin will always work, and so we may revert back to the new and supported WYSIWYG/"markdown" editor in the future (And by which time hopefully that will have been developed further).
Feel free to post about quirks/etc.. in a polite way and I will add them to the list.
BTW, if there is a silent majority that would prefer we revert to the WYSIWYG editor, let us know. One thing is sure, that we would see improvements over time with that too.
Comments
Hehe, is that "big brain" term like "you're bad!" meaning really good. It has so many layers of bloat that the module creator has no clue as to what's going on underneath.
Hehe, is that "big brain" term like "you're bad!" meaning really good.
Yes, it is like that.
@Buck Rogers you May find this link useful: https://www.markdowntutorial.com/
it looks to be a complete ground up tutorial on markdown. I guarantee you could find several quick references on the subject with a few google searches.
Oh the editing this morning (Oz time) was sooo painful. It stopped responding many times for what seemed like minutes (probably 30s). IMHO this needs to be priority #1. If this cannot be resolved then this software or hosting needs replacing. No point in continuing if the basics cannot be fixed.
in the meantime, I think many of us just want the BBS code returned. Markdown seems like a kludge using backticks, asterists, etc. At least [ b ] and [ /b ] were somewhat intuitive, and we had the little icons to click on. At least we can continue on with our posts. Not being able to format your posts and do partial quotes is a real game changer. Hopefully going back here is easy and gives us time while the fundamentals are fixed.
The visuals are good enough. Room for improvement absolutely. But we need go back to basics while the fundamentals (speed and response) is fixed.
just my 2c
In post # @VonSzarvas wrote: "fix up the stale links to old forum urls in posts"
I hope this include fixing inline images in older posts.
Thanks for working on this.
Update:
The editor box should now work without the cpu freeze issue. Please road test and let me know if there are any technical issues with it.
Notes:
ps. There are some styling options available in a popup menu, if you highlight a section of text whilst posting.
I wasn't really affected by the freezing (well, maybe my Wii doesn't explode after a minute now?), but the code block cursor jumping thing is still happening, which I think is related to high CPU usage (I think the jumping is related to language detection - to figure out which language a code block is, it has to try parsing it with every loaded language and then it keeps the one that generated the most keywords and modes)
Also, the announcements seem to now permanently clog up the front page
How do you mean? Some announcements are set to all pages, others to specific categories. It's always been like that, hasn't it ?
No, the front page used to treat announcements like regular threads, they just appeared when they had new replies. Now they are always on top. The P2 forum is announcements only now, you can't actually see any normal threads without going into the category page. To add insult to injury, the "more discussions" button that'd take you to that page is gone.
You can click the form headings to go to that category.
Yeah, I can see the more... link below gets floated on some of the groups. Should be able to bring those back today. The headings could do with hover tags too.
As for the annoucement behaviour; will investigate.
If you click on the gear icon, and then dismiss, the announcements move down to their chronological position. At least that's the way it works for me.
Posts with only "new" are not highlighted in yellow like the ones with a number before the "new" label.
Was already discussed earlier, is intentional.
The forum is also slow, kind of. Paging up/down or using the mouse wheel feels unresponsive. The screen real estate is wasted as well (30% of the left section is blank due to the menu etc at the top), with the zoom level I need for text. I have to go page after page to figure out what I haven't read yet. Right now this is not a happy place to be, it's tiring to read. It's a relief to move to forums using e.g. Discourse. Or nearly anything - minus vBulletin, it's got too many problems, but at least even that one is easy to read and use.
Paging up/down or using the mouse wheel feels unresponsive
That's an issue with your computer/browser, I fear.
The screen real estate is wasted as well (30% of the left section is blank due to the menu etc at the top), with the zoom level I need for text
Depending on your screen size and desired text size, try zooming a bit more than you'd actually need. There's a media query that kicks in when the screen is narrow that makes the sidebar go away.
@VonSzarvas said "Are there any other posts you could offer an example which have an issue with the images not showing?"
Here's an older post with broken images. Two images which were attached to the post show up only at the bottom of the comment. I had originally inserted these images inline. I also had inserted a couple images from other forum posts.
Links to some of the older forum posts work in the above linked comment. The working links are ones I manually edited. One link I didn't fix uses the text "Hex Caster board" in the link.
Here's a post with broken images. This particular forum thread has lots of images. Some of the images seem to be fine while others don't appear. Post #1 and post #9 have images which appear to be fine. Post #4 of the same thread (the one linked earlier) doesn't have any working images. Post #20 of the same thread has a mixture of both working images and broken images.
The broken image uses IMG tags. The image which works correctly uses ATTACH tags. I wonder if I can get the other image to appear using ATTACH tags?
(This is where it would be nice to have a preview.)
[ATTACH=CONFIG]98092[/ATTACH]
Edit: No that didn't work.
I have a suggestion.
The forum home page shows the ten forum sections, and below each section heading are 5 threads with title and summary.
The summary includes view counts, comment counts, started by, and also lists the section name, like "Announcements".
But since the section name is already prominently displayed right above the thread summaries, instead of listing the section name, why not show the timestamp of the latest comment? I think that would be helpful.
OK, understood. Those are database issues which I intend to get sorted in the near future. There's a whole bunch of urls from at lease two forum versions as I can see, which were never converted at the time of the various forum updates. My intention is to put these things right, so thanks for the examples that I can follow.
Just saw a weird thing about the "more discussions" link: apparently if there are un-dismissed announcements the link doesn't appear, as soon as you dismiss all the announcements (and refresh the page) the link appear again.
How do I delete a file that was attached to a post?
There's two ways to upload files, the old file upload plugin and the built-in one.
The former works as usual.
With the latter, uhhhhh..... I don't think you can get rid of already uploaded files
EDIT: You can! just backspace it away. Alternatively, you can open devtools and delete it from the DOM, that seems to work, too.
Have any of the dev team tried to add a CODE block using Markdown on an iPhone? I ask because the (`) character is buried deep in the alt keyboard a few layers. Its literally a minute to type three of these in a row on an iPhone.
Maybe it would be possible to map three of its inverse twin (‘) to mean a CODE block? Those are easily accessible on the keyboard. Food for thought...
IMHO I dislike markdown :(
I’m not feeling the love here either @Cluso99, but it sort of looks like we are stuck with it. Sort of like having a non-fatal disease: we just have to learn to live with it the best we can and adapt. Dog knows I’m trying... :)
None of this should be construed as criticism toward Parallax or @VonSzarvas. Seems they got handed a short-notice turd and also had to adapt.
BLECH!
Markdown is modern and is used in a lot of places (github, discord, wiki's, and so on), bbcode is ancient and dying out.
That said, this editor is not a good example of a markdown editor. It needs an edit source mode at a minimum, "wysiwyg only" sucks and this one has serious issues. That is not a fault of markdown, just this editor implementation.
Sorry Roy, but I have to disagree. Just because it's widely used doesn't make it any good, or easy to use.
From the markdown tutorial here
https://www.markdowntutorial.com/
Italics... You need to surround the text with underscores
Bold... You need to surround the text with a pair of asterisks
At least [ i ] and [ /i ] and [ b ] and [ /b ] made sense. Underscores and asterisks are likely to be present in any text.
Even html is way better with "<" strong ">" and "<" /strong ">" . Heck the editor doesn't even let me type it without the ".
This is a major step backwards!
I believe we're not stuck with markdown.
Italics... You need to surround the text with underscores
Bold... You need to surround the text with a pair of asterisks
At least [ i ] and [ /i ] and [ b ] and [ /b ] made sense. Underscores and asterisks are likely to be present in any text.
How do those BBcodes make any sense? (unless you know a bit about the underlying HTML...)
Whereas Markdown formatting is intuitive, since it's just how most people would convey alternative font styles in a plaintext environment. (In that sense,markdown is readable without actually rendering it). Also, they only count at the beginning or end of a word, not inside a word and not free-standing. I find it is rare that it gets in the way. Maybe with programming symbols that start/end with underscores, but those semantically belong in a code block.
Additionally, I find it more comfortable to type it out along with the text, less characters and no need to bend my fingers into origami to reach the square brackets and whatnot (perhaps less of an issue on US layout).
This however, is not markdown, this is bad WYSIWYG that pretends to sometimes understand some Markdown-isms. I literally cannot type something that'd false-positive as italics into a code block because the editor is stupid and thinks to convert it into italics.
_RET_<- There we go, that was an ordeal. A real Markdown editor lets you type first and asks questions later.It actually makes sense, if you were around when messages were ascii text, wysiwyg editors were a myth and people used to highlight words with asterisks and underscores.
For what is worth, I find quicker to make a word bold with asterisks than trying to find what code makes it bold today.
Just noticed that quoted text can't be edited ... bad!
The editor works fine now, very good.
Today we try a new editor plugin.
There are plenty of shortcomings as this is no longer supported by the provider, but if the majority agrees this is the editor to stick with (as long as possible), then I'll put some time into improving it.
Things like the default code button behaviour (inline vs codeblock), @ detection of usernames in the codeblock, visual style of the codeblock content, quoted panel needs to be height-limited, etc.. leap out, and no doubt other things will present themselves!
We will stick with markdown, because we cannot guarantee this plugin will always work, and so we may revert back to the new and supported WYSIWYG/"markdown" editor in the future (And by which time hopefully that will have been developed further).
Feel free to post about quirks/etc.. in a polite way and I will add them to the list.
BTW, if there is a silent majority that would prefer we revert to the WYSIWYG editor, let us know. One thing is sure, that we would see improvements over time with that too.