Suggestion Post Formatting Suggestion

[Foxi4]

Lately we're seeing a lot of issues concerning funky fonts or odd colour schemes in posts. Those posts sometimes even make it as far as to the front page and frankly, they're an eyesore... but I can partially understand those who post them.

Whenever you copy-paste content into the textfield, it automatically selects the size, font and colour used in the original source material. As such, in order to default to whatever formatting you originally intended to use, you have to select the entirety of the pasted content, remove the fomatting (which is facilitated by the Remove Formatting button, but still...), re-set it to what you actually intended to use and then carry on typing.

This doesn't only concern the pasted portion of the text - as you continue to write your post, you're going to do so using the font settings of the text you've just pasted in.

Be it out of negligence or hurry, the result is always the same - messy posts with crazy fonts that are all over the place using colour schemes which rarely match the commonly used Dark theme.

Now, my proposal is pretty simple - have the textbox ignore the font settings of the pasted material and instead paste just the characters. If not ignore, at least make it default to the standard font upon pasting. I'm not entirely sure how feasable that'd be to code, but I think it would improve the quality of posts significantly.

Yes, I know I can already do that by disabling Rich Text editing, but I'm sure there has to be a way to implement this even if only as an additional feature without exiting the Rich Text editor.

Thoughts?

 

[Rydian]

Yes. This is a much more reasonable idea than disabling colors alltogether.

 

[the_randomizer]

Agreed, something needs to be done to make such posting more streamlined/more efficacious while not making it messy.

 

[tj_cool]

Now, my proposal is pretty simple

Simple as an idea, yeah.
But far from simple to implement it. XenForo uses a heavily modified TinyMCE editor. It's a real PITA working with it....

 

[Foxi4]

Simple as an idea, yeah.
But far from simple to implement it. XenForo uses a heavily modified TinyMCE editor. It's a real PITA working with it....

I figured as much, which is why I said that I'm not sure how feasable it is to implement.

 

[Another World]

what fixes this and streamlines posting is to disable the rich text editor. since you know that is already a solution, why are you against using it? you still get all the basic formatting options with the bonus of font attribute stripping.

perhaps what we could do is move that check box out of your personal settings and into the new thread window. that way it could be toggled on/off when needed/required. so you could turn it off when making news posts but leave it on the rest of the time to allow for more individualistic posts.

-another world

 

[Foxi4]

what fixes this and streamlines posting is to disable the rich text editor. since you know that is already a solution, why are you against using it?

you still get all the basic formatting options with the bonus of font attribute stripping.

-another world

I know how to post posts that don't look hideous, but a lot of other users don't or don't care to edit them - I thought that's pretty apparent. A feature like this would save moderators truckloads of time spent on adjusting posts to viewing standards.

 

[Another World]

i wasn't aware they were moderating posts before pushing them to the front page =P

all jokes aside, perhaps we should disable the rich text editor for USN, regardless of user settings? maybe something like that is much easier to implement for TJ.

-another world

 

[tj_cool]

I guess I could so the formatting on the server side with a few regexes (stripping colors/fonts, centering images, etc)
It would also remove colors added by the user itself though, so it would only be done when a new thread is created in the USN.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I have a better way to remove the formatting. Copy it into notepad, then copy it out of notepad again. Boom, formatting gone.
I always do this when I copypasta something.

 

[Rydian]

I have a better way to remove the formatting. Copy it into notepad, then copy it out of notepad again. Boom, formatting gone.
I always do this when I copypasta something.

But lots of people don't, which is the issue.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

But lots of people don't, which is the issue.

Indeed. It also doesn't help that using the normal skin, you won't be able to see if the text has black color formatting or not that will mess up the post on the dark skin.
I've never liked WYSIWYG editors, I prefer having full control over formatting and bbcodes. I've found WYSIWYG post editors tend to mess up certain things, such as linebreaks. I had an issue where it was adding more linebreaks every time I edited my post. Can't remember if it was this forum, but I'm pretty sure it was using XenForo.