Voting to deactivate MD parsing inside the WYSIWYG editor, provided a MD-only editor still exists. A tool should do one thing well.
I’ll copy my comment from the other thread in here, though, since it’s relevant: Don’t hide the alternate editor in the user profile. Make it selectable when commenting, and remember the selection. Quite aside from making it immediately obvious that there’s more than one way to post, it means you can measure users’ preferences by seeing what they use to post with, with much less selection bias (owing to much less inconvenience for the non-default option).
So, first off, thanks for the disable-pseudo-WYSIWYG option! (Now we just need Markdown in profiles working again. :) )
As for this:
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).
[Actually, before I address that, a bug! When I copied and pasted the above quote into the comment box here, the width of the comment box suddenly shrunk by a substantial amount, and has remained shrunken as I continue to type this. No idea why.]
Anyway, yeah, I’d say that letting people format their comments without it being a huge pain is substantially more important than avoiding it looking intimidating. I mean, if it were scaring people away from commenting entirely that would be one thing, but otherwise I’m not seeinng the problem. Also like… most people have used a WYSIWYG word processor at some point so I’m confused as to what’s so intimidating here? When things are not explicitly displayed it’s just confusing.
(That said, now that I’ve set mine to just use Markdown without all that, I guess I no longer have much of an interest in the result, so I don’t think I’m going to keep arguing about this. :) )
It’s not super high on our priority list and I didn’t see them used very much on the old LessWrong, so we don’t currently have any short-term plans for them. In the long-run, seems quite likely we will get to it eventually but the timelines are quite unclear.
If a good chunk of people express preferences for polls, then I think it would make sense to move them earlier (or if someone makes a good argument that they are particularly important for making intellectual progress).
Upvote this if you want us to deactivate the automatic markdown parsing in comments by default.
Voting to deactivate MD parsing inside the WYSIWYG editor, provided a MD-only editor still exists. A tool should do one thing well.
I’ll copy my comment from the other thread in here, though, since it’s relevant: Don’t hide the alternate editor in the user profile. Make it selectable when commenting, and remember the selection. Quite aside from making it immediately obvious that there’s more than one way to post, it means you can measure users’ preferences by seeing what they use to post with, with much less selection bias (owing to much less inconvenience for the non-default option).
(Replying here to comment in other thread.)
So, first off, thanks for the disable-pseudo-WYSIWYG option! (Now we just need Markdown in profiles working again. :) )
As for this:
[Actually, before I address that, a bug! When I copied and pasted the above quote into the comment box here, the width of the comment box suddenly shrunk by a substantial amount, and has remained shrunken as I continue to type this. No idea why.]
Anyway, yeah, I’d say that letting people format their comments without it being a huge pain is substantially more important than avoiding it looking intimidating. I mean, if it were scaring people away from commenting entirely that would be one thing, but otherwise I’m not seeinng the problem. Also like… most people have used a WYSIWYG word processor at some point so I’m confused as to what’s so intimidating here? When things are not explicitly displayed it’s just confusing.
(That said, now that I’ve set mine to just use Markdown without all that, I guess I no longer have much of an interest in the result, so I don’t think I’m going to keep arguing about this. :) )
Personally I prefer having no visible buttons, it makes the interface cleaner and more elegant.
Maybe make this an option as well?
Are you planning to implement polls in the future?
It’s not super high on our priority list and I didn’t see them used very much on the old LessWrong, so we don’t currently have any short-term plans for them. In the long-run, seems quite likely we will get to it eventually but the timelines are quite unclear.
If a good chunk of people express preferences for polls, then I think it would make sense to move them earlier (or if someone makes a good argument that they are particularly important for making intellectual progress).