Vladimir, great work! But I really can't understand people that still continue use mail for communication, for me forum like http://forum.rejectedsoftware.com/groups/rejectedsoftware.vibed/ is perfect.

mail communication have a lot of contras. Messages are can't be edited, problem with markdown and so on.

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 13:31:05 UTC, sigod wrote:
> On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 12:57:23 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> 1. People receiving messages through NNTP/mailing lists will not see the formatted Markdown.
>
> That isn't a problem at all.

I don't know what you mean by this. I provided several examples of situations in which problems can occur.

>> 2. How should we render messages sent by NNTP/mailing-list users?
>
> Why should we?

For one, sending the same text will change its appearance depending on which client you use to send it. Copying text between posts can drastically change its appearance to the point of corrupting it or making it unreadable.

This reminds me to another problem with Markdown: you can't copy rendered text, paste it in your message, and expect it to display correctly. The forum does not have this problem with quote margins (there are invisible "> " characters which will be copied with the post), but it is difficult to extend this all the way to Markdown formatting.

>> Do we just assume that they're sending Markdown and render it as such?
>
> Yes. You already do it for quotes.

The quotes are part of the formatting that all clients are already in agreement with. It is part of RFC 2646 and others. Markdown isn't.

>> This can cause the messages to appear broken to forum users.
>
> Yes, it can be a problem. But, first: markdown render should be optional. And second: don't render if you're not sure how to render it.

We definitely should not expect users to choose how they want to display others' posts.

And, please elaborate on "if you're not sure how to render it".

>> 3. There is no unified standard for Markdown. The original format is not used on major sites today - StackOverflow and GitHub extend the format, and users will expect Markdown with those extensions.
>
> There's always should be a help which explains what supported.

Few things turn me down from making a first post on a forum more than having to read a "How to format your post" page first.

> Also, I don't think we need _all_ syntax and all possible extensions. Just those which will improve readability.

Great, so another Markdown variant.

>> 5. You can't edit posts once sent. This means that if you accidentally messed up the formatting (e.g. you pasted code without padding it with whitespace or surrounding it in ```...``` blocks), you can't go back and edit it now.
>
> I'm aware of that. As I said before: "don't render if you're not sure how to render it".

As above?

>> You see this all the time on StackOverflow (even though it's user-editable) and more importantly on the vibe.d forums. It's pretty ugly
>
> It all depends on actual users. We can't do anything about this.

Blaming the users never works. If you start blaming users en masse, you've become blind as to how crappy your UX is.

>> 6. How do we encode that the message is in Markdown in the message's headers?
>
> Again. Why should we? See #2.

1. The forum needs to recognize which messages are Markdown-formatted somehow.
2. Text must be sent in such a way as to maximize readability in other clients.

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 13:20:18 UTC, Bastiaan Veelo wrote:
> On Thursday, 4 June 2015 at 15:04:05 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> http://beta.forum.dlang.org/
>>
>> Many major and minor improvements.
>
> Awesome, great work.
>
> In threaded mode, the frame around the message body could be a bit thinner (like the frame around the message header) to differentiate it more from the quote level lines.

Fixed, thanks.

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 09:22:34 UTC, sigod wrote:
> On Thursday, 4 June 2015 at 15:04:05 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> http://beta.forum.dlang.org/
>
> When writing reply you click `Save and preview`:
>
> URL changes from http://beta.forum.dlang.org/reply/sqqngcfwtkhxeoiqnbpt@beta.forum.dlang.org to http://beta.forum.dlang.org/send.
> As does text at the top of the page (`Index » Announce » forum.dlang.org, version 2 (BETA) » Post reply` -> `Index » Posting error`).

Fixed, thanks. The URL change is intentional, the breadcrumb "error" label on preview was a leftover.

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 09:43:18 UTC, extrawurst wrote:
> On Thursday, 4 June 2015 at 15:04:05 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> http://beta.forum.dlang.org/
>>
>> Many major and minor improvements.
>>
>> Some major ones:
>>
>> - dlang.org theme, fully responsive and mobile-friendly
>> - keyboard navigation in all views
>> - automatically saved post drafts
>> - get notified of new posts and replies with subscriptions
>> - full text search
>> - by persistent request, a new view mode (vertical-split)
>> - post to mailing lists
>> - even faster, believe it or not.
>>
>> This update is the sum of 256 commits over 34 days of development.
>
> I now love the j,k shortcuts. but is it possible to go to the next page of messages instead of wrapping around the same page when reaching upper/lower bound ?

The wraparound is useful, but I was thinking of using the H/L keys to navigate pages, what do you think?

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 12:57:23 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 1. People receiving messages through NNTP/mailing lists will not see the formatted Markdown. Although Markdown's goal is to be readable in its plain text source code, it still allows many situations in which the source is misleading or difficult to understand. For example, special characters need to be escaped by a backslash, which can create confusion in the presence of other special characters. (Are they part of the D syntax the user is describing, or something else?) Some syntax such as tables or images can also be not very readable in source form.

What about supporting only a few features like hyperlinks and code blocks? These should be unambiguous and not conflict with anything.

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 12:57:23 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 5. You can't edit posts once sent. This means that if you accidentally messed up the formatting (e.g. you pasted code without padding it with whitespace or surrounding it in ```...``` blocks), you can't go back and edit it now.

We already have this, see http://forum.dlang.org/post/yfykbayodugukemvoedf@forum.dlang.org

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 14:06:32 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 12:57:23 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> 1. People receiving messages through NNTP/mailing lists will not see the formatted Markdown. Although Markdown's goal is to be readable in its plain text source code, it still allows many situations in which the source is misleading or difficult to understand. For example, special characters need to be escaped by a backslash, which can create confusion in the presence of other special characters. (Are they part of the D syntax the user is describing, or something else?) Some syntax such as tables or images can also be not very readable in source form.
>
> What about supporting only a few features like hyperlinks and code blocks? These should be unambiguous and not conflict with anything.

Yes, we could do that, with the downside of implementing our own Markdown variant with its own instruction manual. But we already use footnotes for hyperlinks by convention, and code already looks fine, so what's the gain? Syntax highlighting?

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 14:13:54 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 12:57:23 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> 5. You can't edit posts once sent. This means that if you accidentally messed up the formatting (e.g. you pasted code without padding it with whitespace or surrounding it in ```...``` blocks), you can't go back and edit it now.
>
> We already have this, see http://forum.dlang.org/post/yfykbayodugukemvoedf@forum.dlang.org

This is fixed now.

http://beta.forum.dlang.org/post/yfykbayodugukemvoedf@forum.dlang.org

On 6/5/15 8:57 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 09:16:30 UTC, sigod wrote:
>> How about markdown support? It can have completely client-side
>> implementation.
>
> I have thought for a long time about this.
>
> It's tricky.
...
> 5. You can't edit posts once sent. This means that if you accidentally
> messed up the formatting (e.g. you pasted code without padding it with
> whitespace or surrounding it in ```...``` blocks), you can't go back and
> edit it now.

This. I mess up markdown all the time. If I can't edit, I'd be screwed :)

-Steve