forums and social networking sites should be plaintext, no embedding
fixed-width font, no automarkup
and definitely DO NOT do things like automatically numbered lists so that when i put "3." at the beginning of a line it turns it into a numbered list starting with "1." instead
tools for making ASCII art, ASCII tables, etc. should be provided
this makes forums as accessible to as many people as possible
rather than making it the domain of people with recent browsers that can run all that nonsense
STOP TRYING TO BE OH SO CLEVER AND "HELPING" ME DO TYPE WHAT I WANT TO TYPE
I'D RATHER BE IN CONTROL OF EXACTLY EVERYTHING I TYPE
EXACTLY EVERYTHING THAT I TYPE SHOULD DISPLAY
NOTHING LESS
NOTHING MORE
IT'S THAT SIMPLE
of course the two exceptions would be BBCode and HTML markup.
but if BBCode is used, everything outside of BBCode tags should be left as-is
and if you're gonna use HTML at least be consistent, please, and force everyone to learn to use <br> tags
can't we just have one or a few standardized ways of doing things that apply everywhere, rather than every place trying to do its own weird unique thing
well at least multiple linebreaks in a row works here *coughcoughDISCOURSEcoughcough*
and definitely DO NOT do things like automatically numbered lists so that when i put "3." at the beginning of a line it turns it into a numbered list starting with "1." instead
tools for making ASCII art, ASCII tables, etc. should be provided
this makes forums as accessible to as many people as possible
rather than making it the domain of people with recent browsers that can run all that nonsense
STOP TRYING TO BE OH SO CLEVER AND "HELPING" ME DO TYPE WHAT I WANT TO TYPE
I'D RATHER BE IN CONTROL OF EXACTLY EVERYTHING I TYPE
EXACTLY EVERYTHING THAT I TYPE SHOULD DISPLAY
NOTHING LESS
NOTHING MORE
IT'S THAT SIMPLE
of course the two exceptions would be BBCode and HTML markup.
but if BBCode is used, everything outside of BBCode tags should be left as-is
and if you're gonna use HTML at least be consistent, please, and force everyone to learn to use <br> tags
can't we just have one or a few standardized ways of doing things that apply everywhere, rather than every place trying to do its own weird unique thing
well at least multiple linebreaks in a row works here *coughcoughDISCOURSEcoughcough*
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Chat can be opened in a separate window, like Steam Community's webchat.
1. minimal use of animated gifs (and webms)
2. don't use java applets or flash unless there's a special thing that needs it (e.g. if there's an interactive game thing that's the point of the page) -- and don't put it on a homepage unless that's the whole point of the site.
3. all elements on a standard webpage (barring special elements like flash) must be compatible with standard navigation and context menu functions, such as highlighting and copying text. (exceptions may be made for web apps that are specifically made to imitate other things such as Google Docs but those should ideally have a "safe space" where one can still access such features, rather than overriding them for the entire page.)
I'm also sick of having to work around said auto-markup to make my posts look the way they should.
On that forum, inserting new lines in my raw post data doesn't insert new lines in the displayed post. And typing "#." to start a line (where # is any number other than 1) will cause the line to become a numbered list, starting at 1 (regardless of the number I typed).
As for the thing here, there's the issue where if I copy and paste stuff from comment box back into itself, it'll suddenly screw up a bunch of newlines in messy ways that I'll have to clean up by going into the HTML or using notepad as a "medium" and pasting/recopying there first. The latter is actually the easier solution.
The HTML view here is actually decent, though it has one issue, which is that linebreaks in there also count as linebreaks in the post, rather than being ignored the way they would be if you put them into an HTML file and loaded it up in a browser. I think this may actually be what's happening in the copy/paste bug -- it somehow copies the linebreaks as well. The WYSIWYG editor doesn't show them, but the finished post does.
I like simplicity where there are few features but they are very robust and rarely ever break. Much better than making things look pretty but hard to work with. Unless they're designed as static set-pieces.