Blog Documentation Book a Demo
Vanilla 1 is no longer supported or maintained. If you need a copy, you can get it here.
HackerOne users: Testing against this community violates our program's Terms of Service and will result in your bounty being denied.

Format comments...It's so dang confusing

skubeskube
edited June 2007 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
I have one big beef with Vanilla and that is the "Format Comments" option. It seems to me that one of the more fundamental (if not paramount) aspects of a online forum is getting content posted in a simple, intuitive, lowest common denominator type of way. After all, not everyone knows BBCode and/or HTML.

My users are constantly asking me how to embed videos and create links because it I can't setup my site in an easy to use way. Frankly, I've gotten lost myself trying to find the magical combination among the myriad of possible extensions available. I tried installing the following:

AutoP
BBCodeParser
BBInsterBar
FCKEditor
HtmlFormatter
Extended Text Formatter 1.2
ForcedBBCode
QuickTags
etc...

Why should it be so difficult to find an easy solution to a task that everyone needs every time they post or edit a comment?

For me and my users, ideally there shouldn't even be a "Format comments as" option at all. If someone simply types text with spaces between paragraphs, that's how it should display (yeah, use AutoP). If someone simply pastes a URL from their browser, it should automatically create a clickable link (yeah, use Extended Text Formatter). If someone wants to embed a youtube/google/metacafe video, simply paste the url or click a button (yeah, use BBInsertBar, sorta...)

Surely, I'm not the only one who's experienced some degree of frustration getting this working the way it should...am I?

Comments

  • WandererWanderer
    I second all of that skube, even though I feel I have fought those battles and found solutions, sort of, if I was honest and put my good feelings about Vanilla aside, none of them are ideal. I feel your pain.

    Posted: Wednesday, 13 June 2007 at 1:55PM

  • StashStash ✭
    Doesn't something like FCK or TinyMCE cover this?
  • skubeskube
    edited June 2007
    Thanks Wanderer (as an aside, why does your post have the exact date of your post? Did you manually add that?)

    Stash, myself and others have experienced problems getting FCK to work. TinyMCE is slow a bit too complicated for the average user. For example, inserting an image shouldn't require a description, alignment, dimensions, border, vertical/horizontal space options to be specified. In addition, Tiny doesn't allow for YouTube (et al.) to be embedded.
  • WandererWanderer
    Quote: skube
    pic ...why does your post have the exact date of your post? Did you manually add that? pic
    Yes I have a QuicKey set up that enters the date and time then posts the comment for me. I think it's nice to know what day and time it is when people are posting, so if you don't hear from them for hours or days, knowing it was late at night or over the weekend would explain it.

    Posted: Thursday, 14 June 2007 at 8:16AM

  • MySchizoBuddyMySchizoBuddy
    for video use extentended text formatter which will convert you links to live links,. then jQmedia will make them into videos.
    thats the lowest common demonitor for embedding video.
    copy paste youtube link thats all.
This discussion has been closed.