As a writer, you should have heard about exaggeration. :P I'm just saying that enough writers mess up formatting to start worrying about it. Crazy colors are a thing of the past (Web of 90s), but Courier New and "pretty" fonts still exist. PDFs which are very hard to read on small screens are commonplace. Pages and PDFs which have uncomfortable line lengths or spacing are everywhere.

MD isn't suited for stories, I agree, but BB doesn't usually have tags for indenting and it collapses whitespace just like HTML, and distilled HTML tends to be very limited too.

It took a week to get my comments approved here, so I don't know when the comment above will be approved (and whether it'll be approved at all), so I'll copy-paste the relevant part here:

Now, if we're talking about writers and their stories, it's a complex problem and just adding BB won't solve that much. If there's formatting like bold/italic, it'll be lost after copy-pasting. If formatting is somehow preserved, then crazy fonts may be preserved too. Overall, adding BB solves a few tiny issues with formatting stories, but still leaves most of the problem untouched.

Even SoFurry, which for many years was THE furry story website (not sure about now), has many problems with formatting. MD is a bad solution, but BB isn't much better. We need something else, we need WYSIWIG with HTML, we need tools for improving formatting and fixing typography, we need tools for configuring formating by readers. There's a lot to do, and I'm not convinced that BB is a step in the right direction.

Disabling all formatting and allowing HTML in MD — these I can see as a part of the final solution. It may be future-proof, but I'm not sure yet.

Considering you're a writer, it'll be interesting to hear your opinion. I'm mostly a reader.

> it a separate thing and it should always be less than an empty line

Isn't this exactly what I said? Two lines separated by two line breaks in source text produce "A<BR/><BR/>B" in BB and "<P>A</P><P>B</P>" in MD, usually. That means you can get whatever spacing between paragraphs you want in MD (with spacing defined by CSS, which you can't usually adjust though), but in BB, it's always unformattable line breaks. Well, BB parsers which produce paragraphs exist, but it's close to impossible to meet one in the wild.

> no ANY WAY to circumvent it

Didn't I just give you a clear instruction on producing line breaks just like in BB?

> Using asterisk for footnote is 100% correct

The only absolutely correct formatting and relatively common formatting which MD messes up, so far. :)

> but we are talking about common people and hobbyist writers using a website

Now, if we're talking about writers and their stories, it's a complex problem and just adding BB won't solve that much. If there's formatting like bold/italic, it'll be lost after copy-pasting. If formatting is somehow preserved, then crazy fonts may be preserved too. Overall, adding BB solves a few tiny issues with formatting stories, but still leaves most of the problem untouched.

Even SoFurry, which for many years was THE furry story website (not sure about now), has many problems with formatting. MD is a bad solution, but BB isn't much better. We need something else, we need WYSIWIG with HTML, we need tools for improving formatting and fixing typography, we need tools for configuring formating by readers. There's a lot to do, and I'm not convinced that BB is a step in the right direction.

Disabling all formatting and allowing HTML in MD — these I can see as a part of the final solution. It may be future-proof, but I'm not sure yet.

1. I agree about emotes, it actually happened to me. However, emotes shoudn't really be used in stories and using submission comments for roleplaying is questionable at best. If you want to RP, you can actaully use MD to your advantage instead of fighting it. You're using asterisks for separating speech from actions, but why not use bold or italic? A roleplay doesn't stop being a roleplay if you construct proper sentences or your emotes are highlighted.

2. Asterisks for footnotes are common, but there're lots of other characters. It's a matter of preference. †, ‡ and § are ignored by MD.

3. Using hyphens for dialogs is wrong. You should use em dashes. En dashes, em dashes and other similar characters aren't processed by MD.

If there're any problems with non-breaking spaces, it's a bug and should be reported. It'd surely annoy me if something happened with non-breaking spaces.

One point I completely agree with you is that non-standartized nature of MD causes issues. But instead of adding BB, I'd rather have a CommonMark-conformant parser. It does support HTML, it seems, so I don't see any reason to disable it here. Is there a ticket about it?

You forgot your original post at the very top refers to "minorities" and "majorities" without any proof-links... You're as guilty at baseless claims as I am. :)) By the way, I'm as surprised as you're that this feature request received so many downvotes - maybe your claims are the reason?

But let's talk about reasons for feature requests in general.

Reasons like "I don't need it, but maybe somebody needs it, or maybe I'll need in the future" are bad reasons. And your "quoting poems every day" reason is just this - unless you prove it's actually useful to a considerable number of users, it isn't valid.

Why is this reason bad? From a developer's point of view, you're wasting their resources - intead of working on something which actually benefits lots of users, they spend time on something very few, if any, will need. It makes code more complex - harder to maintain, harder to add new features, easier to miss bugs.

From a designer's point of view, you're making user interface more complex. Complex UI means more confused users, more user mistakes. You're wasting screen space on unnecessary controls.

"When I copy this text from Word into text editor on the site, I get garbage in preview box and need to fix lots of text and formatting" is a valid reason. There's a clear problem, there're multiple ways to solve it, there's actual need, you can see who needs it and why. "Somebody may need to quote poems every day" is not a valid reason. There's no "somebody" in feature requests.

It's just a general advice from somebody who sends bug reports and feature requests pretty frequently. There's a bigger chance to be noticed if you provide reasons and clear examples. Appealing to personal preferences is less reliable. :)

Infinite scroll is memory-intensive by design. Browsers don't provide API for manually controlling every bit of memory, what you have is a way to tell the browser, "allocate a chunk of memory and release it when you feel like it", more or less. When you remove an image from a page, it doesn't release image data immediately, it just makes releasing possible. It's the browser that decides when to free RAM and VRAM. It should be noted that pagination isn't a magic solution either as it has the same problems, just to a less degree. At least with pagination you control precisely how many images are displayed.

Chrome is designed to consume all your free memory. :) If you're so low on memory you worry about 200-300 MB per Chrome tab, you shouldn't use it. I think the breaking point for me was 16 GB RAM + 16 GB swap on SSD. This is when I stopped caring about Chrome consuming RAM.

Firefox is better at this. I'm surprised by your 1.5 GB limit - are you sure you check private bytes, not working set, which is usually displayed by default? On my system, Firefox crashes when it reaches ~3 GB, and it takes days browsing and hundreds of open tabs.

The reason for anger is that FN tries to be "new FA", yet it's more like "new Tumblr". If it succeeds in overtaking FA (of which I doubt, but whatever) without improving basic socialization features like commenting, it'll harm the community, and that's something I want to avoid.

Haha, I see this navigation now. I missed it because I always open images in a new tab, and in this case navigation doesn't appear. The reason for opening in a new tab is obviously the fact that back button isn't supported in the "endless" scrolling. And I just like separate tabs. So, this feature is totally useless for me in its current implementation. Also, this navigation is partially duplicated by navigation in the side panel, which isn't good.

Names should only be the same if files are the same. If I accidentally save a thumbnail or a half-res preview, I'd prefer it to have a recognizable postfix like "-thumb" or "-preview". If an image is small enough to not require downloading to view in full resolution, then and only then file names can be the same (if devs decide to implement it).

"Jokes" like that are disallowed even on FA, because they break search. Not that anyone cares...

The sad fact is that writers think they can format, but they can't. If you let them use Word, they'll use crazy fonts, crazy paragraphs etc. PDFs produced from Word files like this are even worse because you can't fix anything on your side.

If somebody finds that their text got unwanted formatting after being processed by MD parser, there's usually something wrong with formatting already: using incorrect symbols for footnotes and dialog ("*" and "-" instead of "†" and "—"/"–"), formatting with spaces (spaces aren't for indenting) etc. BB forgives this, HTML forgives even incorrectly nested tags in quirks mode. MD makes you think about what you're doing. Garbage in, garbage out.

As for paragraphs, MD forces you to use proper paragraphs. Two line breaks = new paragraph, period. This allows proper formatting, unilke BB which doesn't support creating HTML paragraphs at all, so you can't get 0.66 white space between paragraphs (like in properly formatted web pages) or indent on the first line (like in books).

By the way, judging by your original post, you don't know about a forced line break. If you put two spaces after a line, MD parser will insert a line break without starting a new paragraph. But it's more like a rarely needed hack, you should almost always use paragraphs.

I find your claims that MD is unintuitive funny. If you find yourself in a situation where only text is available, using asterisks and underscores for emphasis is just natural, as well as using asterisks for formatting lists. MD at its core is designed to mimic what people actually use.

Did you miss the whole text e-mail age? Text chats?

BB may feel "natural" in "intuitive" only for someone born during PHPBB rise and fall. BB may also feel this way for web devs with HTML experience, but you don't appear to be a programmer, or you wouldn't make claims about HTML or BB being much more effecient. :)