After reading a number of recent comments noting “Please use the standard font.” I’m wondering if a technological block stopping people from using a nonstandard font would be a worthwhile use of programmer time. Thoughts? I myself don’t have a strong opinion either way, but I figured the first thing to do was to get a better feel for current opinion.
Edit: Is there a way to correct spelling without destroying a poll?
Barring people from using their chosen fonts inhibits me from using a quick crank heuristic to save my time by ignoring them, so I would be against it. We should let them select themselves out of the memepool.
On Less Wrong, I guess this heuristic mainly ignores people who wrote their article in MS Word and have not lurked here long enough to be aware of this pitfall. Is that strongly correlated with low quality articles?
I suspect that there are times when it’s appropriate to “use nonstandard fonts to good affect”. Would it be just as easy to issue a warning with the option to “convert to standard font”? Then everyone wins.
Is there a benefit from doing that server-side rather than client-side? I’ve long since configured my web browser to always use my favorite font rather than whatever is suggested by any website.
I’m going to agree with this post. Maybe an option to make everything appear in a preferred font would be useful, if the programmers aren’t busy with anything else.
After reading a number of recent comments noting “Please use the standard font.” I’m wondering if a technological block stopping people from using a nonstandard font would be a worthwhile use of programmer time. Thoughts? I myself don’t have a strong opinion either way, but I figured the first thing to do was to get a better feel for current opinion.
Edit: Is there a way to correct spelling without destroying a poll?
[pollid:543]
Barring people from using their chosen fonts inhibits me from using a quick crank heuristic to save my time by ignoring them, so I would be against it. We should let them select themselves out of the memepool.
On Less Wrong, I guess this heuristic mainly ignores people who wrote their article in MS Word and have not lurked here long enough to be aware of this pitfall. Is that strongly correlated with low quality articles?
I believe that is exactly the assumption behind the heuristic—newcomers’ posts are of lower average quality.
I suspect that there are times when it’s appropriate to “use nonstandard fonts to good affect”. Would it be just as easy to issue a warning with the option to “convert to standard font”? Then everyone wins.
Is there a benefit from doing that server-side rather than client-side? I’ve long since configured my web browser to always use my favorite font rather than whatever is suggested by any website.
I’m going to agree with this post. Maybe an option to make everything appear in a preferred font would be useful, if the programmers aren’t busy with anything else.