As an RTE integrator I have swam in a vast experience of usage, and learned that it is a dangerous thing for me to develop something that has popular usage and then decide rather strictly on the usage of said product.
Of course sometimes my product is not able to achieve this or that (yet), and I would gladly disclaim that. And sometimes I want to start a trend (a dangerous pioneering path) and then I would impose my opinion on the lot.
But for the most part, I leave as many things as customizable as possible, with my opinion+general inclinations rolled out into the default settings.
Firstly, the software Developer allows all manner of possibilities (even crazy ones ... and crazy is seriously relative)
Secondly, the site admin tweaks some more
Thirdly, the site forum moderator/admin does some more tweaking
Lastly, the end user is able to use only what has been allowed
It is vital that, in the firstly part, the developer leave as much room as possible, or else cramping would occur too soon, way before the enjoyment of the product can be achieved.
@esenjin Text formatting is not the job of the text editor?! But the one of the theme? I really can't follow your logic here...
The logic found here is somewhat like this or else I am horribly mistaken.
Site Theme has all those nice stable uniform aesthetic CSS rules, and then a user comes in and starts inserting things like
<font size="3" color="red">This is some text!</font>
<a href="example.com" style="color:hotpink;font-size:300px;">I AM A THOUGHT LEADER YOU MUST LISTEN TO ME</a>
But I won't intentionally limit my product because some admin refuses to customize and use the product according to their desire.
On that pitch, the RTE would have even more options where the above abuse could (not would!) be made impossible and then provide a setting such asselect clasnames/attribute
<span class="red-text">This is some text!</span>
<a href="example.com" class="pinkFloydCholeric">I AM A THOUGHT LEADER YOU MUST LISTEN TO ME</a>
I for one, use one forum to annotate poetry. And users have a choice of a myriad of preset CSS classes to choose from. Although no one is ever allowed free range insertion of worldly inline CSS.
I hope I have been as unclear as possible or as my dim wits have allowed.
Exactly. From our experience working with people & companies providing forums (1000s of them currently) we find that users being able to choose their own colors can really interfere the theming of a site.
Take this example:
Objective: Make your moderators & administrators have a different post appearance.
Their site theme has actually changed in appearance a couple times over the years, including how they style this type of post. If they had coloring allowed in the editor, changes in their theme could potentially make certain older posts looks really bad, or worse be unreadable.
Another feature that can be accomplished through theming is dark mode support. CSS can check if systems like iOS, Android, Windows, or MacOS are in dark mode and apply different styles. This provides a similar challange. What colors look good against a light and dark background aren't the same.
Another point against the feature is accessibility concerns. Many color combinations don't provide adequate text contrast for users with vision issues. See https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ for a tool to help pick adequate contrasting colors.
Possibilities
One possibility that we would consider is to allow a user to choose from a few preset colors, that would be defined by the theme. If the theme changed those colors in the future, the colors of the user's post would then change with the theme.
Thank you, I now have a better understanding of your reasoning.
Afterwards, although this is not useful for a majority, it may be of interest to others. On our side, being able to color the text is really a necessity, we really need to be able to use a color code for a very large part of our published messages.
We will try to see if there are alternatives.
One possibility that we would consider is to allow a user to choose from a few preset colors, that would be defined by the theme. If the theme changed those colors in the future, the colors of the user's post would then change with the theme.
To opt for no text-coloring options shows a huge lack of understanding what web communities are and what flexibility Admins would probably like to provide to their users in more than a few edge cases.
Sorry for being polemic but if “1000” forums do not offer another perspective than the one from a technical stand point I am seriously surprised.
These little kinds of formatting freedoms have shaped the cultural grammar of web community culture for years and rowing back on a little option like this signalizes that Vanilla bows to the boredom of large entrenched social media standardizations of today.
The most active communities were and are build around autonomously developed formatting languages developed by their members which in many cases represent information visibility and individuality while accepting the equality approach of post horizontalism.
I am bluffed.
VanillaAPP | iOS & Android App for Vanilla - White label app for Vanilla Forums OS
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Luckily it's on the roadmap for the year. It's a sticking point for a few of our big cloud customers to migrate over, so it'll need to get in sooner or later.
UX problems 4: line breaks are paragraphs. When I hit enter key, I get a new paragraph. I found no way to simply get a line break and a line break is what I expect when I hit enter. When I want to structure a text I want to be able to create meaningful blank spaces myself. Not being able to "join" to lines by simply using a line break and let them close together is a major drawback for me. If text style would be of no importance for me, I would be a facebook user.
This is a big issue. I think what he means is there's a lack of Shift + Enter. Right now when pressing Enter you get a new paragraph with a space which is correct, but also you can't line break properly because there's no Shift + Enter. So if you want to make a list of names without having space between you have to use lists (or keep pressing Space till it line breaks, but this might mess up on various resolutions).
Comments
As an RTE integrator I have swam in a vast experience of usage, and learned that it is a dangerous thing for me to develop something that has popular usage and then decide rather strictly on the usage of said product.
Of course sometimes my product is not able to achieve this or that (yet), and I would gladly disclaim that. And sometimes I want to start a trend (a dangerous pioneering path) and then I would impose my opinion on the lot.
But for the most part, I leave as many things as customizable as possible, with my opinion+general inclinations rolled out into the default settings.
Firstly, the software Developer allows all manner of possibilities (even crazy ones ... and crazy is seriously relative)
Secondly, the site admin tweaks some more
Thirdly, the site forum moderator/admin does some more tweaking
Lastly, the end user is able to use only what has been allowed
It is vital that, in the firstly part, the developer leave as much room as possible, or else cramping would occur too soon, way before the enjoyment of the product can be achieved.
@esenjin Text formatting is not the job of the text editor?! But the one of the theme? I really can't follow your logic here...
The logic found here is somewhat like this or else I am horribly mistaken.
Site Theme has all those nice stable uniform aesthetic CSS rules, and then a user comes in and starts inserting things like
But I won't intentionally limit my product because some admin refuses to customize and use the product according to their desire.
On that pitch, the RTE would have even more options where the above abuse could (not would!) be made impossible and then provide a setting such as
select clasnames/attributeI for one, use one forum to annotate poetry. And users have a choice of a myriad of preset CSS classes to choose from. Although no one is ever allowed free range insertion of worldly inline CSS.
I hope I have been as unclear as possible or as my dim wits have allowed.
Cheers :)
Exactly. From our experience working with people & companies providing forums (1000s of them currently) we find that users being able to choose their own colors can really interfere the theming of a site.
Take this example:
Objective: Make your moderators & administrators have a different post appearance.
Example: ESO online's community manager get's a special design on their post https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6392631#Comment_6392631
Their site theme has actually changed in appearance a couple times over the years, including how they style this type of post. If they had coloring allowed in the editor, changes in their theme could potentially make certain older posts looks really bad, or worse be unreadable.
Another feature that can be accomplished through theming is dark mode support. CSS can check if systems like iOS, Android, Windows, or MacOS are in dark mode and apply different styles. This provides a similar challange. What colors look good against a light and dark background aren't the same.
Another point against the feature is accessibility concerns. Many color combinations don't provide adequate text contrast for users with vision issues. See https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ for a tool to help pick adequate contrasting colors.
Possibilities
One possibility that we would consider is to allow a user to choose from a few preset colors, that would be defined by the theme. If the theme changed those colors in the future, the colors of the user's post would then change with the theme.
Thank you, I now have a better understanding of your reasoning.
Afterwards, although this is not useful for a majority, it may be of interest to others. On our side, being able to color the text is really a necessity, we really need to be able to use a color code for a very large part of our published messages.
We will try to see if there are alternatives.
One possibility that we would consider is to allow a user to choose from a few preset colors, that would be defined by the theme. If the theme changed those colors in the future, the colors of the user's post would then change with the theme.
This may in fact partially address the problem.
Thank you for your explanations !
I’m really just describing how we might choose to implement it as a feature.
Priority of it is a bit behind other editor features though, including:
that’s not to say it won’t ever get done for rich editor, it’s just pretty far down the list.
Maybe we need some documentation so that other vanilla users can start writing usable plugins for this editor.
Mmh, I have to add some raisins to the bakery.
To opt for no text-coloring options shows a huge lack of understanding what web communities are and what flexibility Admins would probably like to provide to their users in more than a few edge cases.
Sorry for being polemic but if “1000” forums do not offer another perspective than the one from a technical stand point I am seriously surprised.
These little kinds of formatting freedoms have shaped the cultural grammar of web community culture for years and rowing back on a little option like this signalizes that Vanilla bows to the boredom of large entrenched social media standardizations of today.
The most active communities were and are build around autonomously developed formatting languages developed by their members which in many cases represent information visibility and individuality while accepting the equality approach of post horizontalism.
I am bluffed.
@phreak I will settle my mind by calling it a technical oversight.
We need the align content function 🙂
Luckily it's on the roadmap for the year. It's a sticking point for a few of our big cloud customers to migrate over, so it'll need to get in sooner or later.
UX problems 4: line breaks are paragraphs. When I hit enter key, I get a new paragraph. I found no way to simply get a line break and a line break is what I expect when I hit enter. When I want to structure a text I want to be able to create meaningful blank spaces myself. Not being able to "join" to lines by simply using a line break and let them close together is a major drawback for me. If text style would be of no importance for me, I would be a facebook user.
This is a big issue. I think what he means is there's a lack of Shift + Enter. Right now when pressing Enter you get a new paragraph with a space which is correct, but also you can't line break properly because there's no Shift + Enter. So if you want to make a list of names without having space between you have to use lists (or keep pressing Space till it line breaks, but this might mess up on various resolutions).
A Shift + Enter would be really great!