📌 BBS Style Manual!

[OtherMichael]

I don’t even get that on Mobile Firefox. I get my system-text-copy, which I then paste in manually, after I dig through to find a right-angle.

[Clifton]

@tropo

Wow. We must be uber-mutant freaks then .

I believe the term of art among the cognoscenti is “ancient spirits of evil.”

[Israel_B]

You may have just explained why I didn’t even know mobile Firefox existed

[anon37332521]

I’m going to go bask in that then. Should I mix up a dark and stormy to go with it?

[Israel_B]

@codinghorror how about the [embiggen] tag?

[Skeptic]

@codinghorror

bbcode is ultra obscure, compared to Markdown and especially HTML

I never ran into Markdown until Discourse, but I come across bbcode frequently. So, even lacking a survey, I’m gonna have to disagree with bbcode being “ultraobscure”.

@codinghorror

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,

Right. It is so not a problem and definitely not an urgent problem that you didn’t even realize it was in the code for a year an half, but now that you know about it you must get it out immediately.

[codinghorror]

More like, “so obscure that literally nobody cared”, but yeah, removing 26 lines of individual CSS plus 10 lines of code that was already pointed out as seriously buggy on this very site – that is a net good.

I’ll do some stats later but I would be very surprised if [size] was used in 1 in 10,000 posts.

[fiddlingfrog]

@codinghorror

bbcode is ultra obscure, compared to Markdown and especially HTML

Yeah, I’m with @Skeptic here, the first time I heard of Markdown was when the BBS began (and it’s the only place I’ve ever encountered Markdown either.) BBcode is still widely used, enough so that I’ll find a new forum that uses it every month or so.

[anon37332521]

1 in 1000 posts over what time period? I’ve looked a bit at stats for folks who only spend a week or so on the BBS, vs regulars. Are you going to look into those sorts of stats before nuking a tag some of us regular bastards seem to use on a, … regular basis?

[Skeptic]

@codinghorror

I’ll do some stats later but I would be very surprised if [size] was used in 1 in 10,000 posts.

What are the stats for the

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Horizontal Rule Bar?

If you are gonna get rid of uselessness based on stats, why not start there?

Also, I’ll bet [spoilers] is used at a fairly low rate on a per post basis, yet it is a very handy feature when you need it. I’m not convinced that gross stats are really the best tool for making these decisions.

[nemomen]

@Skeptic

Horizontal Rule Bar?

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Noooooo I love `

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`, don't steal my lines. Also they're used a lot.

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yes I'm boosting hr stats.

[nemomen]

I’ll admit to not liking bbcode, esp. when mixed with html tags and markdown. I get the need, and can process it, but the cognitive load on someone who doesn’t know the three would have to be high (and I’ve seen people not quite get the fact that there are three markup languages coexisting). Also, FWIW, getting the three to coexist nicely as well as they do is nice work.

It’d be really cool to do a frequency analysis of all bbcode tags including [poll] [quote] [size] [spoiler] [b] [i] [u] [code] [email], etc. so we’d have the data. Usage data would make it nice and clear what people are really doing (I can’t even guess, and since I’m bbcode avoidant I’m surely biased).

[anon68952647]

 

I’M JUST GOING TO USE ALL CAPS FROM NOW ON

[nemomen]

[size=huge]ME TOO[/size]

[Israel_B]

EMBIGGEN PLEASE

^or^don’t

Odd which parts of markdown work and which don’t

[Clifton]

@nemomen

yes I’m boosting hr stats.

Splendid! You must be the new HR assistant!

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Yes I am a terrible person.

[nemomen]

@Clifton

Splendid! You must be the new HR assistant!

We have some great news about your raise this year, you’ll be getting 2 Canadian Tire dollars.

[TailOfTruth]

[codinghorror]

@Skeptic

I never ran into Markdown until Discourse, but I come across bbcode frequently.

There’s this thing called HTML, you should look into it. It’s, uh, <i>fairly common</i>.

[Skeptic]

@codinghorror

There’s this thing called HTML, you should look into it. It’s, uh, <i>fairly common</i>.

I’m really not sure of the point of your post; that I should try to use HTML tags for formatting in a web forum that only uses bbcode?