Formatting changed?

[Quinten]

Formatting of newlines seem to have changed?

I'm sure previously there would have been a bigger blank space between this line and the line above, as if everything was a new paragraph...

[Kingster]

Yes it was part of the last update. 

 

Just add an extra return if you want 👍

[Quinten]

That explains why my latest blog all of a sudden looked crap and needed extra spacing...  ok, will add more returns going forward!

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

Also means that things like addresses, lists ET now don’t end up double spaced all the time. 

 

 

[Kingster]

Yeah sorry - it was one of those mods that has knock on effects. I actually tried to undo it and then it got worse - won’t go into the long story but short one is, what we have works better now than any alternative i tried. 

[Quinten]

Another thing I've just discovered.  Pasting text with formatting no longer transfers the formatting.  Previously it would give you the choice if you wanted to paste with or without the formatting...  Could we either get this back, or allow us to choose between 1 or 2 fonts?  A fixed font like Courier please...

[Kingster]

This was because some users occasionally posted heavily formatted text that was just plain difficult to read. 

 

The formatting is kept deliberately simple to aid with readability and consistency. 

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

Oh heavens yes, a few would constantly insist in posting long closely spaced, paragraph free pieces, all typed in one of those horrific mock copperplate type fonts. Other members, genuinely had to then post how to copy and paste the original unreadable posts into new posts in substitute fonts. Or the other old favourite choosing a font colour that matched closest to their car. This would be ok on a BMW forum where it was all dark grey, dark blue, black etc! Unfortunately for us, yellow is usually one of the most popular colours. And a yellow font on a white screen is again, really difficult to read. (You ended up having to select the text, as if about to copy it) just to be able to read it.

 

And of course, those amongst us with any sort of publishing or graphic design background, etc. used to end up as gibbering  wrecks in the corner at all these abhorances!

[Kingster]

15 hours ago, Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Secretary said:

those amongst us with any sort of publishing or graphic design background, etc. used to end up as gibbering  wrecks in the corner at all these abhorances!

That’ll be me then! 🤣

[Quinten]

Ah well, yet another nail in the blogs coffin...  why do I bother 🙄

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

7 minutes ago, Quinten said:

Ah well, yet another nail in the blogs coffin...  why do I bother 🙄

 

People love reading them.

 

Mind you, I must admit, I don’t know the reality of the actual figures, but going by replies, it does always look like Build threads get more traffic than the blogs. Maybe people just surf the forum side more, and forget the blogs a little?

 

Certainly people seem to get way more engagement with an enthusiastic readership in our forum, via the threads...

[Kingster]

13 minutes ago, Quinten said:

Ah well, yet another nail in the blogs coffin...  why do I bother 🙄

 

How so Quinten? What exactly do you need to format that is not possible to show using the available tools?

[Quinten]

7 minutes ago, Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Secretary said:

 

People love reading them.

 

Mind you, I must admit, I don’t know the reality of the actual figures, but going by replies, it does always look like Build threads get more traffic than the blogs. Maybe people just surf the forum side more, and forget the blogs a little?

 

Certainly people seem to get way more engagement with an enthusiastic readership in our forum, via the threads...

 

The reason (for me at least) to keep a blog is to document my car's upgrades/problems/etc, eventually serving as a complete service history.  It is not to start a dialog, that's what the forum is for.  If you stick it on the forum where you get replies in between, the actual content will just get lost.  I don't care about traffic, but I do care that it looks good.

 

2 minutes ago, Chris King - Webmaster and Joint North East AO said:

 

How so Quinten? What exactly do you need to format that is not possible to show using the available tools?

 

If you look at my latest entry: https://forum.wscc.co.uk/forum/blogs/entry/440-april-2019/ you can see that I use a fixed font underneath each "sub heading" and a small totals section at the bottom.  This is now no longer possible, as you can not format the text in that font, and neither can you paste it in (like we used to).  We can format in bold, italic, underline and strike through...  what about a button that formats in fixed width?  A blog should be a mini website page.  If you look at Tel's Tales: https://forum.wscc.co.uk/forum/blogs/entry/431-tels-tales-ty-croes-oct-2018/ it has become unreadable...  where's the motivation to spend time on it?

 

 

[Kingster]

@Quinten I've added a font drop-down into the blogs for you.

 

As for Terry's layout - well, it's entirely up to him if he decides that the cut & paste text looks OK. All he needs to do is add in a few carriage returns to help with readability after all.

 

As they saying goes "you can't please all of the people..." 

[Quinten]

I'm not seeing anything different Chris, just the Tx button, but no font drop down ?

 

My point about Tel's blog is that he too relied on the additional space a paragraph used to create, just like I did for my blog posts.  What used to look ok, and was perfectly readable, has overnight become a big unreadable mess.  I understand why it has been done, but that doesn't make it any better.  Whitespace costs very little to store in the database, but it adds a lot to the readability.

 

But if the font drop down works as assumed, then I consider it case closed...