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Make markdown parsing "opt in"

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Tekkub

05 Dec, 2008 09:52 PM

Now that we've been using tender for GitHub for a little while, I've noticed a big trend: user's don't know markdown, nor realize their comments are parsed with it. This results in things being "eaten" by the parser, since single newlines are ignored, and HTML tags are usually interpreted.

So here's my proposal: make the user actively choose when they want their comment parsed by markdown. If they do not choose this, handle the message the way a web forum or email app would. Convert newlines into breaks, wrap URLs in tags to make them into proper links, and sanitize everything else. This would give users the general behavior they're used to everywhere else on the web, but it keeps markdown around for the "power users" who want it.

I know you guys (weenie!) probably have strong opinions against this... but step back and look at the site from an "average user" perspective. To them, this is just another internet forum. It might not have rich text edit boxes and BBCode, but they still expect things to look exactly how they type them in. Tender's all about the users after all, so I think you should try to cater to their expectations of how things would work.

1. 1 Posted by Will on 06 Dec, 2008 12:04 PM

   

   I agree, general users are seeing application support and we may have assumed a higher geek level factor when thinking about Lighthouse support base during Tender's development.

   There should be an option in a users profile that you should have to an enable, and rather than Comments are parsed with Markdown. Help with syntax have a tool-tip/option to enable that remembers from there on out.

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2. 2 Posted by RedBubble Suppo... on 09 Dec, 2008 06:32 PM

   

   This is even more important when your users are used to textile formatting

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3. 3 Posted by System on 17 Dec, 2008 02:19 AM

   

   This discussion was assigned to ticket 166.

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4. 4 Posted by Frederik on 14 Jan, 2009 06:53 PM

   

   +1 for assuming a lower geek level factor

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5. 5 Posted by rick on 30 Jan, 2009 06:08 AM

   

   We're doing this, and may make it required on emails. If not required, maybe just a way to swap renderers on the fly. It may make things like stack traces look a little funny though, so we may also add a plain text view.

   Here is what I have now. I think I started getting a little carried away (hey, it was a long plane flight!) and may simplify it a bit.

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6. 6 Posted by bkayser on 18 Mar, 2009 06:26 PM

   

   I like the human formatting idea. You don't have to get carried away with this though.

   It would be awesome if I could just turn off markdown with a checkbox on a post.

   But even if I could just type something like

   --no-markdown
   

   as the first line of an issue, that would go a long ways. That way when a users email is all garbled, I could just edit it and insert '--no-markdown' at the top and it clears up so I can read the stack traces, etc.

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7. 7 Posted by Luke Andrews on 25 May, 2009 03:29 PM

   

   Any update on this?

   I also want to see Markdown parsing disabled for new tickets generated by email. In fact, I could probably live without Markdown in general in Tender. It's great for internal use, but when end users are using this, I think Markdown is too intrusive.

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8. 8 Posted by rick on 25 May, 2009 06:16 PM

   

   Yes, we're just waiting for some UI stuff. The backend is currently implemented. The trick is adding it to the layout without messing up custom CSS layouts that people have.

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9. Nicole closed this discussion on 10 Dec, 2009 08:54 PM.