Your comments

Four or five seems a bit much. Not everything will require that many tags, otherwise you risk people using near-duplicate tags. Three sounds like a good number; just enough to include a species, a gender, and a topic.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but as somebody who is (by your own admission) not a writer, you don't exactly have a voice in what formatting style is most beneficial or convenient for a writer to use. I don't want to sound elitist or anything, but that's honestly what I think. This discussion isn't about whether Markdown or BBCode or HTML are superior in all ways, it's about whether Markdown is a viable tool for writers to use instead of the alternatives that exist.


To give an example, let's compare Notepad, Word, and Scrivener. You can certainly write a story in Notepad, but it will be far easier to format and edit in Word. Scrivener is even higher above Word in convenience and giving writers tools they need. If you get a job as a professional writer, what would you do if you were told that all your documents had to be submitted in Notepad? You'd be requesting that you can submit them in Word or Scrivener instead, as they're superior, more flexible programs that are better suited to your needs.


By telling writers, as a reader, that they have no reason to request an alternative to Markdown, you're adding an opinion that doesn't exactly apply to the situation. Especially when it seems like the bulk of your argument, and the point that you keep repeating, is "they'll use different fonts" or that the writers who don't know how to format well should be a valid reason to hold back those who do.

Agreed, views by the content creator should not be counted. It just makes it misleading as to how many people have actually looked at something.


Another idea that I'd suggest in addition to this one is "Views" and "Unique Views" -- the former would tell how many times something has been viewed, and the latter how many individual people have viewed it.

This is a great idea! I can see it being helpful for making sure chapters of a story/comic are uploaded on a consistent basis, even if the writer/artist is busy with something else that would pull them away from the site for a few days.

I agree. This seems like something that would be better fixed by just folding mute and block together and keeping the act of blocking quiet so as not to create drama, rather than turning one feature into an exact copy of another. It would just be redundant and potentially confusing.

I've never used crazy fonts or crazy paragraphs in my writing. I'm not sure where you get this idea that all writers are like this, but it's like saying all artists use crazy colors and crazy line thickness -- it's just silly.


The problem with Markdown is that it's not commonly used on sites designed with written work like you'd see on this site or others like it. And when a writer wants to publish their story on multiple sites, having Furry Network as the sole outlier that uses Markdown requires a writer to create a second copy just for this site. It's a needless hassle that can be fixed by giving a better set of tools that would allow for easier cross-site posting.


Especially if a writer likes to do longer stories, like myself. It's a huge pain to have to go through line by line and alter the formatting I already have in place to a new system, especially in a story/chapter with a lot of italic text in it. And when a character is having an internal dialogue with himself, I find that italic text is a better way to show it without constantly injecting "He thought to himself" into the prose.


Indenting in Markdown is also a pain. There's no way to do it as simply as hitting the Tab key; instead, you have to enter a lengthy string of text to basically trick Markdown into creating an indentation. All told, it takes 36 characters to indent a paragraph by six in Markdown -- this isn't intuitive, this isn't convenient, this is a hassle.


There's absolutely no benefit for a writer to use Markdown compared to another format.

Comment and downvote retracted. Sorry for the misunderstanding. :)

I like this idea. The "Popular" section for artwork or other types of submissions has been showing me the same submissions for over a week now.

I agree. It makes it difficult to find topics that are still up in the air when the front page is full of things that have already been implemented, approved, or declined.

Seems like it's just adding extra steps and hassle for something that shouldn't be a problem anyway, provided the site is properly secured and users are smart about not reusing passwords.


Perhaps adding it as an optional extra step for people who want it, but I don't see the point in making it mandatory for everyone. (Unless the intent wasn't that it's mandatory for everyone; if this is the case, then I retract my comment)