Editor corrupts expressions

The forum’s editor corrupts certain (unformatted) expressions, which is unpredictable, surprising, unexpected, and leads to unreadable and uncomprehensible results, and as it is absolutely unexpected it probably will not even be noticed by the author compellingly:

e.g.,
typing without formatting

#include <cstring>

appears just as
#include

could you please fix that?

That isn’t an error. Its just markup.
If you type two of these: #

Awesome Text with 2 #

Even more bolder awesome text with only 1 #

Make sense?

I think you didn’t get my point.
Of course I see that the # is used as a formatting tag, but that’s exactly what is faulty!
# must never be a formatting tag !
Instead,# is a common letter which is used for coding,
and the issue is about intending to write in standard text layout just

#include <cstring>
#include <iostream>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>

and I do not want to format it by a bigger font size!!
And there must not be a need to have to compellingly format that by extra code tags!

the whole block of 4 #includes instead appears as
#include
#include
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>

and that is faulty, as the editor corrupts both the hash sign # and the rest of the library names, i.e. the <...> parts!

phpbb and vBulletin boards don’t do that ever!

the hash sign # must not be a formatting tag, it must be a simple printable character key in standard text, and the <...> part behind must never become corrupted, too!

Hi @HaWe,

Thanks for pointing this out to us. As @graykevinb, said it is the way the editor is designed. We will have a discussion with the our discourse handlers and try to make it better.

Please do understand we are trying to help you and as a gentle suggestion, try not to make your conversations hurting to anyone. As you know these are text messages and not voice, so things can be misinterpreted.

Once again, thanks for your suggestion and we will have discussion with our team.

-Shoban

hi,
the biggest disadvantages are that for formatting purposes your forum’s editor uses single chars (letters), and not bb tags instead:

[quote] [/quote] 
[code] [/code]
[u] [/u]
[b] [/b]
[i] [/i] 
[size=] [/size]
[color=] [/color]
[list] [/list]
[url] [/url]
[img] [/img]
[movie] [/movie]
[youtube] [/youtube]
... (and many more, to be continued)

Additionally, it is unreasonable that your forum’s editor expands links automatically to a preview:
That is not always wishful (actually mostly unwishful):
a link must be a simple link (a text line), and if one wants to make an embedded image or a video preview out of it, then one is free to use the tags for

[img] [/img]
[movie] [/movie]
[youtube] [/youtube]

(again, almost everything of this post again has been corrupted unless that I now reformatted all that belated by code tags!) :frowning:

Of course the BB code tags should be provided by a menu list via button click like you already do, just using BB tags instead of your single char editing.

IMO switching to a BB forum’s editor (phpbb, vBulletin, MyBB) would be the most convenient and the most effective solution.

let me see:


[u]text[/u] 
[b]text[/b] 
[i]text[/i] 

text
text
text

so as it turned out that BB code is supported then it will be much better to dispense with your current formatting tags which lead to drop #,<,> and all that and replace them all by BB code instead!

@HaWe,
I understand that the forums using Markdown as default would be a bit annoying and a lot of things that you have pointed to are genuine problems that other uses would be facing too. I have been personally using markdown for very long so found it pretty convenient and we have had most of the people just post code in files so it has not been generally a bad experience for them.

The formatting options with Markdown and the formatting tab above (especially the block-quote and preformatted text ) have proved very useful to a lot of our users who are new to programming, though a lot of this might just be my personal bias.

We are not sure if there is an easy way to disable Markdown as default for the users. We’ll look into this in depth and get in touch with the guys at Discourse to see if there is an easy way to disable it.

There is a small discussion here if you are interested in the formatting options on the forums .

hi,
as long as Markdown didn’t corrupt the text, it wouldn’t bother - but this is a forum about technics and programming, and as long as it’s corrupting text like

#include <cstring>
#include <iostream>

to
#include
#include

it has to be abandoned finally.

ps,
if you want to point out to a url link, please never just write “here” for that - it is not clearly recognizable as a link and will be overlooked: just post the complete url address, unchanged and unmistakable!

Thanks for the notes on this, we really appreciate your attention to detail! When we find some capacity to work on improving the programming behind the forums, we’ll definitely deal with this!