Ideas
BB-Code
I'd be nice if alongside Markdown, we could get BB-Code and/pr HTML.
The reason being that as far I'm aware. Markdown isn't widely used and therefor not a lot of people actually use it and atop of that a lot of people are used to using something else.
It would be nice if we could get the most commonly used instead of Markdown or have multiple alongside Markdown if changing it to something else, is to much of a hassle. Will make it much easier for everything in the long run.
If that is out of the question, then please make it easier to do stuff in general, like I've seen suggested for stories, all over the site by having a toolbar so we can get bold, font etc. Done easier... Also colored text would be awesome <.=.<
Customer support service by UserEcho
Markdown has been gaining a LOT of traction, and is extremely popular among developers, with a growing user base of professional writers as well. Sites such as the StackExchange Network, GitHub, Reddit, and Weasyl use it, and most blogging software either supports it, or has plugins for it. I believe Slack also supports it, and more services are always being added to that list.
That said, a shortcut bar would be nice for people not used to Markdown, or an option to export plain text files with BBCode into Markdown (perhaps Pandoc?).
This was discussed in another topic somewhere. I'm gonna vote up and say yes again! markdown is confusing and makes copypasting text stuff from other places painful :s
One of the three main reasons I didn't bother with weasyl in the end.
A limited subset of HTML would be nice, in my books, though I realize that means needing to scrub the submitted HTML to make sure that someone's not trying for a high score in cross site scripting attacks. BB-Code, provided that it's a robust option, would also be acceptable.
Alternately, I suppose that we could go the route of the Reddit Enhancement Suite: Reddit's comment system uses Markdown, as does many sites. RES is a browser-based add-on that gives convenient buttons for markup above the window, much like UserEcho does for the commenting system does here. I can highlight a block of text, poke a button, and not need to remember which symbol is needed to bold, italicize, or underline text.
I know this is old, but, the main thing that bothers me about the markdown support on Furry Network is that it doesn't support inline HTML (which the original Markdown docs do support it using). This is coming from someone who uses both Markdown and asciidoc regularly to write stuff.
If they just supported the inline HTML part of markdown properly, I'd be able to post some stuff where I have more strange formatting (like tables).
I can definitely understand why inline HTML is disallowed, though. On an actual site, allowing it could easily open up security vulnerabilities, which is the last thing that the site needs. Even with sanitation, something can slip through.
HTML is supported on many sites. I don't see anything unsafe about it.
If the input doesn't properly filter out certain types of tags and attributes completely, it could cause cross-site scripting attacks, override styling on the site to embed another site, or even cause code to execute without the user's permission.
Most sites that allow HTML do so with either heavily filtered results (which can take a bit of time to develop and test), or by parsing the HTML into some other language first. A couple of smaller PHPbb communities I used to be a part of chose the latter, turning HTML into BBCode, and later into Textile markup.
You are pointing out the obvious. When we say we want HTML we don't say to just add a text field where anything goes... Come on... Obviously we mean a proper solution, just like thousands of websites have that allow HTML.
Also, this is pretty damn standard, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel.
Please read my related proposal and explanation of the problems with Markdown here: http://support.furrynetwork.com/topics/650-/
At this point, we don't plan on implementing BB-Code. However, we do plan on having a WYSIWYG editor in the next few months; this will hopefully help a great deal with formatting all across the site.