Discussion Prettier Forum Posts!

[Noimad96]

Disclaimer: This is a longer post. If you want there's a TL;DR at the bottom and my ideas in relation to it are in spoilers in the the midsection of the post.

Hello guys. I'm Noimad, and I'm a fairly brand spankin' new pirate on the forums here. Have you ran into​

a situation where you've wanted to format a post to make it pleasant to read, and add your own bit of flair to it? Is bbCode not enough for you? Then look no further. I'm putting this in discussion because I'm not even sure exactly what form I want to suggest.

When i was 12 there were 2 games I played most, and one website that never left my history. Those games​

were ToonTown and POTCO, and that website was.... neopets..... ANYWAY. If you played Neopets, you might have opened an item shop before, and in that item shop you could use php to change almost everything. Backgrounds, item locations, menus, everything. I specifically learned how to make drop down menus for that shop before i realized that it was against their terms of use to modify the original buttons and got banned...

Now I know what you're thinking, that would just be too crazy, and I agree. So rather than keep this short​

and just ask, I gave you my life story. But now the multi-part discussion topic. Do you think allowing posters to use certain markup languages is a good idea, if so what language do we choose (my vote is PHP {or phpBB whatever you call it} just because I'm used to it), and if everything follows through to that point, how would we limit the users so they don't abuse it. I have a couple ideas for the last one and ill go ahead and get them out of the way. I'll use the rule of threes i guess.

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Spoiler: Idea 1: The Safest Bet

- Another forum rank slightly elevated from your run of the mill member that must be applied for. ​

Applications would be filled out for this rank which would be reviewed by the moderators in that person's region and/or hours listed. Requirements of course I would leave for the staff to decide on. This way when that player is on, the moderators that are in his reigon will know that if that person posts something, go ahead and review it to make sure they aren't abusing the code Now that's a lot of work and manpower, but I feel it's secure as long as we have a running list of who can use it.
[br]1[/br] I'm leaving this here to prove a point, basic bbCode for a line break and even that doesn't work. Luckily I found a workaround. My workaround? Don't use a numbered list just number it yourself​

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Spoiler: Idea 2: The Fun, Rewarding Method

-Limit the language on lower posting levels in the forum (aka sea dog, wanted pirate, moderator) and​

have more features unlock scaling to your posting level. Not only would it give meaning to the posting level other than a title (which I admit is pretty cool anyways) but it would feel like a forum achievement system and how cool would that be.​

Spoiler: Idea 3: The Simplest but Least Cool Method

-Limit the language on everyone to only very basic paragraph, text, border, etc. options. This one I like the least, just​

because I have some great ideas for some guides, and would love making them look professional.​

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TL;DR, I suck at making my posts pretty with bbCode mostly because of the limitations of the language ​

itself. I would like to discuss a safe but functional way to bring at least the formatting portion of a more powerful markup language into our posts while still playing nice with bbCode for the normies.

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As I've said, this IS a discussion. I want to hear your thoughts and suggestions other than ​

"I'd never use it so who cares."

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Thank you for reading my long winded, badly formatted pitch

Happy holidays and even happier plundering!


-Noimad-​

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[Noimad96]

Also the edit tool is god awful if you have code anywhere to change the alignment for you. It was such a nightmare having to redo​

my alignment every time I went back to edit that I didn't get to fix some spacing issues and the lines are uneven.

 

[Davy Darkrage]

Hi,

First off, welcome to the forums. I hope you enjoy them.

Do you think allowing posters to use certain markup languages is a good idea, if so what language do we choose (my vote is PHP {or phpBB whatever you call it} just because I'm used to it), and if everything follows through to that point, how would we limit the users so they don't abuse it.

I think there may be some confusion here. PHP is a scripting language, not a markup language. The only native markup language on the web is HTML. Allowing users to use either PHP or HTML in any form poses a huge security risk, to the point that input sanitation is not really feasible. It is for this reason alone that the formatting language is BBCode, else the WYSIWYG editor would already be suitable for those who don't know HTML.

phpBB is a forum software, which supports BBCode. We support all of the BBCode found in phpBB and then some. May I ask what limitations you feel the current BBCode imposes? It's likely that they could be addressed without resorting to other formatting languages. Keep in mind some limitations are by-design, as allowing things like background images is likely to harm text legibility in posts.

I also worry limiting the use of advanced formatting options by forum rank is likely to only delay abuse, not prevent it outright.

[br]1[/br] I'm leaving this here to prove a point, basic bbCode for a line break and even that doesn't work. Luckily I found a workaround. My workaround? Don't use a numbered list just number it yourself

A line-break BBCode is unnecessary because line-breaks are already parsed as-is. You're probably looking for Shift+Enter, which will allow you to insert line-breaks without breaking out of the current formatting context.

• It works
  for lists
• just
  fine.

You may also click the wrench icon in the WYSIWYG editor to switch to manual BBCode markup if you prefer to make manual changes.

Also the edit tool is god awful if you have code anywhere to change the alignment for you. It was such a nightmare having to redo​

my alignment every time I went back to edit that I didn't get to fix some spacing issues and the lines are uneven.

You shouldn't have to redo the alignment when editing. The problems you're experiencing seem to be because you've inserted line-breaks in your post where you didn't want them, which will cause the formatting context to reset (unless, as above, you use Shift+Enter).

Davy

 

[Noimad96]

I came into this fully expecting to be schooled, because I know nothing. You make all valid points except for the "edit" button​

at the bottom of the post. What i'm saying, though, is there is just no way to do some of the things that I want to make happen in my posts using strictly BBC. I've already tried using a few of the phpBB features, in the "wrench" view. Namely paragraph styles. They simply don't work any way I've tried them. Also no need for a line break command? Sure I can shift enter. What if I decide I want to force my post to not do what the current one does every time I try to edit.

The first, and only mildly frustrating thing it does is completely destroy my regular line breaks. Sure, whatever, shift-enter a few​

times, fixed. If you've noticed, I have centered spoilers with left-aligned text. I've tried to debug with the "wrench" mode many times. As soon as I click the edit button, my hard [ center ] code disappears, and every line after the start of the code is now centered, including those inside the spoilers which should be exempt from the code anyways because I've book-ended those paragraphs with [ left ][ /left ]. Which i wouldn't even have to do if I could just set the paragraph styles and put those inside the spoilers! It's frustrating, cumbersome, and oh so slow. Took me an hour to get everything to something nice to look at, and that's even with the "edit" button blatantly erasing or not reading code that I put there myself

 

[Noimad96]

At the very least i think we need better formatting options and an editor that correlates better to the actual post. Having to indent the first line of every paragraph, go find where the end of the first line is, close your indent, and hope your spacing was right considering the editor really has no correlation to the actual size of the post, and even then having the preview not even show the right page width so I can get those pretty separator lines right, and then i have to redo my indents AGAIN so my first line doesn't look like a little baby line.

Heck. I could deal with manually first line indenting for the rest of my time here if the editor and preview were the same width as the actual post. Then I wouldn't need to go back and adjust because I could get it right the first time. If you don't believe me about the preview being innacurate, I had my purple lines looking beautiful in preview. As soon as I made this post, they were all at LEAST 20 characters too short. It turned my lines from clear separators to "what are you doing, are you drunk?'

 

[Irene]

All good things that both of you state here, but can I just jump in and say that the average user or well perhaps most of us don't really have use of these things.. I mean don't get me wrong I'm sure they have their purpose but well frankly I didn't understand all that much said here and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I know most people just simply want to be able to write posts and then do only some sort of slight typesetting for better presentation means, but I don't think all of us know what BBcode is or what php is, HTML, and a bunch of other abbreviations mentioned above.

Just leaving this out there thinking that maybe such altering or possible hassle is unnecessary but feel free to carry on with this topic