I have submitted my vote (my vote is “migrate later”, so I did not check either box—why was this not an explicit option?), but I want to repeat my voting comment here, in the hopes that other voters might see it and be inspired to say the same. Original comment follows:
[Added note not in original comment: I couldn’t even copy and paste the above paragraph without it screwing things up, because not only did the stars get converted to rich text italics, an extra space was added after each, screwing up the spacing (there was a space between “bad” and the immediately following period.]
Seriously. Fix this. Its current state is not acceptable. (You should also make Markdown work in profiles again, but that’s a lesser matter.)
I’m not at all disputing your points about the brokenness of the comment editor, so this comment is kinda unrelated, but since we are giving the devs criticism about some of the editing features, I also want to give them some praise:
I wrote my meditation post in a Google Doc originally, and then when I copy-pasted it to the post editor from there, it just worked perfectly right away, no editing needed. That is not the case with most online WYSIWYG editors that I’ve used. That felt amazing, and I imagine some special effort must have gone into that. Now I can just write any extended posts in a GDoc, collect comments and feedback on the draft, and then just copy it to the site without needing to do any editing to e.g. fix unnecessary newlines the way I would need to if I copy-pasted it into a WordPress editor.
The same happens when I copy paste my articles from the Wordpress.com platform, whether I do so from the editor or the published page. Everything except for images just magically moves and looks good with only minimal editing needed.
Yep, I think for people who preferred the old commenting experience, greaterWrong is great. I personally do much prefer the WYSIWIG editor experience, even if it sometimes runs into trouble with markdown, but it seems totally reasonable to differ on that (and I do also really want to fix the bugs in the current editor, which also frustrate me quite a bit).
Actually, on that topic: We could just turn off automatic markdown parsing in our editor for now, and just have it do rich-text via keyboard shortcuts and the toolbar that shows up when you select text. And then we already have the option for a super-plain markdown editor that you can activate in your profile to replace the normal comment editor. Would people prefer that?
That’s basically what I suggested with the defaults reversed, so yes.
Again, part of the problem, if you read my linked comments, is that the editor isn’t WYSIWYG, it’s worst-of-both-worlds. WYSIWYG rich text (with buttons always visible) would be an improvement, as would ordinary Markdown with no WYSIWYG component. I think the latter is preferable to the former, but either is an improvement, and allowing both is even better. I personally would have set the default differently, but that disagreement has no real relevance.
Cool, I created a new Meta post for this. If enough people agree then I think removing the markdown parsing is the way to go for now.
I am not a huge fan of permanently displaying formatting options at the top, because I do think it takes up a lot of unnecessary real estate and makes formatting comments feel a lot more intimidating than it has to. (Though it’s definitely a much harder UI challenge to then still allow people to format things the way they want). I would be happy to discuss that more though, but if we do, let’s continue that in the relevant meta-thread.
I would. WYSIWYG is a terrible editing paradigm, but some people like it, so I won’t argue against providing it. Trying to mix WYSIWYG with markup-based editing, though, is far worse.
I further suggest that the plain option not be hidden out of the way. Make it selectable when commenting, and remember the selection. I wasn’t even aware it existed until just now.
(edit: To be fair, I’m probably going to keep using greaterwrong regardless. Discount my opinion to whatever extent applies)
I would STRONGLY prefer that. I’m sorry for using strong language and I’m trying to be emphatic here, not upset or judgemental, but: I would describe the current state of the editor as “unacceptably broken” and “totally unusable (for anything at all complex)”.
If you don’t agree with me about “unacceptably broken”, please reread the bug I filed about this: https://github.com/Discordius/Lesswrong2/issues/314 -- it’s not just that automatically applying formatting is bad, it’s not even just that it COMPLETELY breaks copy-paste and links that have underscores in them—which would alone be reason enough to turn it off and leave it off—the implementation of autoformatting also DOES NOT WORK RIGHT AT ALL.
I don’t think the existence of an alternate interface has any bearing on whether the main interface is good, or should be promoted out of beta. Practically speaking almost nobody will use the alternate interface. Me using it does not solve any problems except my personal ones, which are of no import.
While I agree there are quite a few people using GW, which I think is good and makes GW worthwhile, LesserWrong.com currently has 30 times as much traffic as GW. So I do think that the main site interface should be the key determining factor.
I do however think that the meta point, which is the existence of an API that allows users to create third-party clients and the proof-of-concept of GW makes a large difference of whether we should move to the new codebase, since it does make a much deeper level of customization possible.
I’m not. And I have given up on many comments because commenting on Android has been broken. It appears to be almost working right now, except the text is flowing outside the comment box. :S
Which users you talk to is going to be such a biased sample though. I would expect lurkers both to be more likely to use lesserwrong and to be a majority of overall users.
I don’t have strong intuitions about whether this applies to commenting though—it’s plausible it doesn’t.
We could just turn off automatic markdown parsing in our editor for now, and just have it do rich-text via keyboard shortcuts and the toolbar that shows up when you select text. And then we already have the option for a super-plain markdown editor that you can activate in your profile to replace the normal commentEditor. Would people prefer that?
I don’t know about other people but I’m not sure what half of that means.
We have our current editor, which is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor that automatically tries to translate markdown you enter into bold. e.g. if you type <asterisk> text <asterisk> then as soon as you press space after the second asterisk, the text gets bolded and the asterisks disappear. This both preserves the WYSIWYG abstraction, while also allowing people to style their content via markdown.
But this also leads to the majority of bugs people have been experiencing with the editor. Sometimes when people post links with underscores, the underscores get translated as italics, and then the link breaks because the underscores disappear, which is what happened in the above comment. And so one option that would remove a lot of bugs from the editor would be to deactivate that automatic markdown parsing.
My understanding is that the single thing that causes most annoyance about the comment composer is that pasting in a URL with underscores in it tends to have horrible results. I agree that that’s really bad, but note that there is a fairly decent workaround: enter some link text, select it, and then paste the URL into the URL-specific box.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I know Sniffnoy knows this, not least because the first URL in the parent of this comment is to a comment from Sniffnoy containing a link made in that way.)
I have submitted my vote (my vote is “migrate later”, so I did not check either box—why was this not an explicit option?), but I want to repeat my voting comment here, in the hopes that other voters might see it and be inspired to say the same. Original comment follows:
My vote is “migrate later”. What do you need to do first? FIX COMMENTING. The current comment composer is seriously bad. I have commented on this repeatedly on LW2.0 to no reply. (Examples: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/vtZsEerABCjhtgizX/beta-first-impressions#aamPf38rosSaiRw8s https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/SQugQ9j7GeWzAuZec/1-5-2018-update-comment-styling#cTtt7yqyELnEHd9cs and more detail over on SSC at http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/25/ot96-snopen-thread/#comment-605324 )
[Added note not in original comment: I couldn’t even copy and paste the above paragraph without it screwing things up, because not only did the stars get converted to rich text italics, an extra space was added after each, screwing up the spacing (there was a space between “bad” and the immediately following period.]
Seriously. Fix this. Its current state is not acceptable. (You should also make Markdown work in profiles again, but that’s a lesser matter.)
I’m not at all disputing your points about the brokenness of the comment editor, so this comment is kinda unrelated, but since we are giving the devs criticism about some of the editing features, I also want to give them some praise:
I wrote my meditation post in a Google Doc originally, and then when I copy-pasted it to the post editor from there, it just worked perfectly right away, no editing needed. That is not the case with most online WYSIWYG editors that I’ve used. That felt amazing, and I imagine some special effort must have gone into that. Now I can just write any extended posts in a GDoc, collect comments and feedback on the draft, and then just copy it to the site without needing to do any editing to e.g. fix unnecessary newlines the way I would need to if I copy-pasted it into a WordPress editor.
The same happens when I copy paste my articles from the Wordpress.com platform, whether I do so from the editor or the published page. Everything except for images just magically moves and looks good with only minimal editing needed.
Huh. That’s not been my experience with Wordpress.
Try www.GreaterWrong.com
Yep, I think for people who preferred the old commenting experience, greaterWrong is great. I personally do much prefer the WYSIWIG editor experience, even if it sometimes runs into trouble with markdown, but it seems totally reasonable to differ on that (and I do also really want to fix the bugs in the current editor, which also frustrate me quite a bit).
Actually, on that topic: We could just turn off automatic markdown parsing in our editor for now, and just have it do rich-text via keyboard shortcuts and the toolbar that shows up when you select text. And then we already have the option for a super-plain markdown editor that you can activate in your profile to replace the normal comment editor. Would people prefer that?
That’s basically what I suggested with the defaults reversed, so yes.
Again, part of the problem, if you read my linked comments, is that the editor isn’t WYSIWYG, it’s worst-of-both-worlds. WYSIWYG rich text (with buttons always visible) would be an improvement, as would ordinary Markdown with no WYSIWYG component. I think the latter is preferable to the former, but either is an improvement, and allowing both is even better. I personally would have set the default differently, but that disagreement has no real relevance.
Cool, I created a new Meta post for this. If enough people agree then I think removing the markdown parsing is the way to go for now.
I am not a huge fan of permanently displaying formatting options at the top, because I do think it takes up a lot of unnecessary real estate and makes formatting comments feel a lot more intimidating than it has to. (Though it’s definitely a much harder UI challenge to then still allow people to format things the way they want). I would be happy to discuss that more though, but if we do, let’s continue that in the relevant meta-thread.
I would. WYSIWYG is a terrible editing paradigm, but some people like it, so I won’t argue against providing it. Trying to mix WYSIWYG with markup-based editing, though, is far worse.
I further suggest that the plain option not be hidden out of the way. Make it selectable when commenting, and remember the selection. I wasn’t even aware it existed until just now.
(edit: To be fair, I’m probably going to keep using greaterwrong regardless. Discount my opinion to whatever extent applies)
I would STRONGLY prefer that. I’m sorry for using strong language and I’m trying to be emphatic here, not upset or judgemental, but: I would describe the current state of the editor as “unacceptably broken” and “totally unusable (for anything at all complex)”.
If you don’t agree with me about “unacceptably broken”, please reread the bug I filed about this: https://github.com/Discordius/Lesswrong2/issues/314 -- it’s not just that automatically applying formatting is bad, it’s not even just that it COMPLETELY breaks copy-paste and links that have underscores in them—which would alone be reason enough to turn it off and leave it off—the implementation of autoformatting also DOES NOT WORK RIGHT AT ALL.
if that were fixed?
Otherwise I think lesserwrong is awesome and is totally ready to replace LW. I have <1000 LW karma though, so I’m not vote-eligible. :-)
You tried GreaterWrong?
I don’t think the existence of an alternate interface has any bearing on whether the main interface is good, or should be promoted out of beta. Practically speaking almost nobody will use the alternate interface. Me using it does not solve any problems except my personal ones, which are of no import.
As far as I can work out—most users I talk to are using gw.
While I agree there are quite a few people using GW, which I think is good and makes GW worthwhile, LesserWrong.com currently has 30 times as much traffic as GW. So I do think that the main site interface should be the key determining factor.
I do however think that the meta point, which is the existence of an API that allows users to create third-party clients and the proof-of-concept of GW makes a large difference of whether we should move to the new codebase, since it does make a much deeper level of customization possible.
I’m not. And I have given up on many comments because commenting on Android has been broken. It appears to be almost working right now, except the text is flowing outside the comment box. :S
Pushing a fix for that tonight! Sorry about that!
Which users you talk to is going to be such a biased sample though. I would expect lurkers both to be more likely to use lesserwrong and to be a majority of overall users.
I don’t have strong intuitions about whether this applies to commenting though—it’s plausible it doesn’t.
I don’t know about other people but I’m not sure what half of that means.
Ah, sorry. Let me clarify:
We have our current editor, which is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor that automatically tries to translate markdown you enter into bold. e.g. if you type <asterisk> text <asterisk> then as soon as you press space after the second asterisk, the text gets bolded and the asterisks disappear. This both preserves the WYSIWYG abstraction, while also allowing people to style their content via markdown.
But this also leads to the majority of bugs people have been experiencing with the editor. Sometimes when people post links with underscores, the underscores get translated as italics, and then the link breaks because the underscores disappear, which is what happened in the above comment. And so one option that would remove a lot of bugs from the editor would be to deactivate that automatic markdown parsing.
My understanding is that the single thing that causes most annoyance about the comment composer is that pasting in a URL with underscores in it tends to have horrible results. I agree that that’s really bad, but note that there is a fairly decent workaround: enter some link text, select it, and then paste the URL into the URL-specific box.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I know Sniffnoy knows this, not least because the first URL in the parent of this comment is to a comment from Sniffnoy containing a link made in that way.)