Maybe not, but what was the harm? It turned out to be a feature that many users here enjoyed. What useful purpose is served by eliminating it? Have you received any complaints about its presence? Has its employment ever materially adversely affected the conversation here? Did it unnecessarily complicate your code in a way that actually hurt the functionality of the site?
Our old pal discbot wasn’t supposed to be here, but @gwwar rightly perceived a need for it, put in the time to create it, and it turned out to be both useful and elegant in its sole purpose as an agent of fun. Should I maybe not have mentioned discbot, for fear of that unintended feature being stricken from the platform too?
OK – if you want extended BBcode support, lobby the BB staff to request the BBCode plugin. Then you’ll get [color] as well.
Arbitrary BBCode font size control was never intended, but note that making large text is still supported with standard markdown headers, and to some extent <big> and <small> HTML.
“It wasn’t supposed to work.” I’d suggest that’s rather moot now. At this point, I’d be wanting to know how many users are actually using this functionality before yanking it. After all, many commercial enterprises use Discourse, and many of them have community managers on staff to admin the forums. Any SIZEable (heh) percentage of users will cause a spike in support calls, and thus a communication plan might be needed, and time needs to be accounted for sites to transition into a plugin if they want it.
Perhaps such usage data is easily accessible to you, but I hate to think you’ve wasted your whole Zombie Jesus day doing data mining.
I wouldn’t mind some sort of quick-reference to useful tags and commands on the bbs. The other day, I was trying to embed a video in a thread (on my phone) and kept botching it. I googled like mad but never found an answer in various Markdown tutorials. I did a search of the Meta category here and finally found a reference that helped, but by that time there were over a dozen posts between the quoted post and my own. A quick-reference wiki thread would have been faster and less frustrating.
(FWIW, all I needed to do was copy the Youtube address and paste it into my reply, without any HTML or Markdown tags. The video automatically embedded.)
What the hell does “supposed” mean? If your design document is telling you one thing and your users are telling you another, what are you “supposed” to do?
It’s your ball, you can take it home with you I guess. I wonder how many posts you broke doing it.
I would be surprised if even one post in ten thousand used [size] for a few reasons:
bbcode is ultra obscure, compared to Markdown and especially HTML
anyone who is familiar with HTML even a little knows <font size> (or equivalent) is some 1996 era nastiness versus semantic markup
it is exceedingly rare to need completely arbitrary inline font size control outside the context of headings (h1, h2, h3) or footnotes (small).
To be honest it gets talked about so rarely that until this topic about how buggy it is came up, I literally forgot [size] existed, and as pointed out in my August 2014 post, it didn’t appear to be supported at all when I wrote that FAQ on bbcode – which was always the intent. I searched for the term on meta.discourse.org, bbcode + size, and got basically bupkis in the way of [size] discussion across the three year life of Discourse.
It is perhaps most relevant for conversions to Discourse, where bbcode was the old law of the land. But since 2013 bbcode is just a crutch we supported to bridge people over to Markdown, and even then, only for formatting that has direct HTML and markdown equivalent…
