All the fancy formatting for headings and tables I made in threads like this, is gone...
Is there anything that Beamdog can do on their end to re-enable support for CSS styles in posts?
Rant: I just don't understand why Vanilla is so over-zealous in making life hard for spammers, that they see no problem with making life hard for legit users as well.
It's not just that they retroactively remove features on a whim that people have relied on, it's also things like the automatic addition of rel="nofollow" to all links, which is bad for googleability. E.g. an excellent way for people to find BG2 portraits is to use this Google Image Search query which lists images with the exact size of 210x330 pixels – but it won't find anything from the aforementioned portrait thread on this forum, because the "nofollow" prevents google from indexing the links to the full-resolution images.
Spammers are usually caught and banned within minutes/hours, so it would totally suffice to have those kinds of restrictions for new users only, and give more leeway to users who have proven themselves not to be spammers by making posts / getting likes without getting banned. /Rant
Font size can only be specified in very coarse steps, and there's no way to do text shadow/glow, but it's workable.
Tables:
aaaa
11
bb
2222
ccc
3
aaaa
11
bb
2222
ccc
3
The "border", "cellpadding", "cellspacing" attributes don't seem to do anything, so with CSS styles being removed by the forum, I don't see a way to get a table with cell borders or with sensible padding. At least background colors work.
I found out the cause: It's because the forum style sets "vertical-align: baseline" on the table cells, and images count as in-line elements, so the first line of text in the second cell is aligned to the baseline of the image.
Apparently it should be possible to override this by adding valign="top" or style="vertical-align:top;" to the table cell with the image, or style="display:block;" to the image element itself, but the forum software foils all of that.
I'm completely lost with the post formatting. It looks like there's no Rich Text, no HTML support, no BBCode support... Does anybody know what works these days?
I found this thread on the Vanilla Forum software's own user forums, and... bad news, they're removing formatting features on purpose. Vanilla staff member "Linc", Director of Development, writes in that thread:
"We removed 'size' as a feature due to accessibility issues. Allowing members to dictate the size at which others read text is a bad experience for low-vision users, as well as users with reading challenges."
"We don't support the 'color' option in the our next-generation editor. That said, color blindness rarely if ever inhibits a person from reading. That's more an aesthetics argument."
I'm *face palm*ing so hard.
Usability issues can be handled on the user end (e.g. by zooming in with your browser)!
Or if people e.g. started to abuse tiny font sizes, it could be handled by moderators telling them to stop doing that!
There was no problem in need of a drastic engine-level "solution" here.
Same with the "aesthetics argument" - let users and mods decide that themselves!
The [size] and [color] tags can be (and have been) used to improve readability a lot - for example, to break up longer posts using subheadings that stand out visually. How does removing this option help anyone, including people with reading disabilities?
But nooooo, Vanilla devs gotta march on in their crusade against formatting options, for Social Justice (or something)...
PS: I'm calling it, support for embedded images will be next to go.
Comments
Like we used to be able to do by writing
ddd
eee
fff
ggg
hhh
iii
jjj
kkk
Testing markdown...
Bold
Italic
Strikethrough
Bold and Italic
Bold, Italic, and Strikethrough
**Bold** _Italic_ ~~Strikethrough~~This is a spoiler.
Heading 1
Heading 2
Heading 3
Heading 4
Heading 5
Alternative Heading 1
Alternative Heading 1
Beamdog Forum
Got it figured out.
Doesn't look like you can link directly to an image on Google drive. You'd need the image URL, not the sharing URL.
Ouch, I noticed it only now.
All the fancy formatting for headings and tables I made in threads like this, is gone...
Is there anything that Beamdog can do on their end to re-enable support for CSS styles in posts?
Rant:
I just don't understand why Vanilla is so over-zealous in making life hard for spammers, that they see no problem with making life hard for legit users as well.
It's not just that they retroactively remove features on a whim that people have relied on, it's also things like the automatic addition of rel="nofollow" to all links, which is bad for googleability.
E.g. an excellent way for people to find BG2 portraits is to use this Google Image Search query which lists images with the exact size of 210x330 pixels – but it won't find anything from the aforementioned portrait thread on this forum, because the "nofollow" prevents google from indexing the links to the full-resolution images.
Spammers are usually caught and banned within minutes/hours, so it would totally suffice to have those kinds of restrictions for new users only, and give more leeway to users who have proven themselves not to be spammers by making posts / getting likes without getting banned.
/Rant
Section 1
...Section 2
...Section 3
...Section 4
...Section 5
Font size can only be specified in very coarse steps, and there's no way to do text shadow/glow, but it's workable.
The "border", "cellpadding", "cellspacing" attributes don't seem to do anything, so with CSS styles being removed by the forum, I don't see a way to get a table with cell borders or with sensible padding.
Example:
second cell, line 1
second cell, line 2
second cell, line 3
second cell, line 2
second cell, line 3
How can I get it to show the contents of the two cells side-by-side without leading space?
Apparently it should be possible to override this by adding valign="top" or style="vertical-align:top;" to the table cell with the image, or style="display:block;" to the image element itself, but the forum software foils all of that.
*some text*abcdef
Not indented Indented by spaces Indented by additional spaces Indented by tabTesting indentations with <pre>
Has anyone figured out how to do the following things with BBCode?
Text size (e.g. for headings/sub-headings)
I've tried:
abcdef
[style size=6]abcdef[/style]
[style size="30px"]abcdef[/style]
[h1]abcdef[/h1]
[heading]abcdef[/heading]
Font
I've tried:
abcdef
Tables
I've tried:
cell 1cell 222
cell 333cell 4
Only a small subset of BBCode, it seems...
I found this thread on the Vanilla Forum software's own user forums, and... bad news, they're removing formatting features on purpose. Vanilla staff member "Linc", Director of Development, writes in that thread:
"We don't support the 'color' option in the our next-generation editor. That said, color blindness rarely if ever inhibits a person from reading. That's more an aesthetics argument."
I'm *face palm*ing so hard.
Usability issues can be handled on the user end (e.g. by zooming in with your browser)!
Or if people e.g. started to abuse tiny font sizes, it could be handled by moderators telling them to stop doing that!
There was no problem in need of a drastic engine-level "solution" here.
Same with the "aesthetics argument" - let users and mods decide that themselves!
The [size] and [color] tags can be (and have been) used to improve readability a lot - for example, to break up longer posts using subheadings that stand out visually. How does removing this option help anyone, including people with reading disabilities?
But nooooo, Vanilla devs gotta march on in their crusade against formatting options, for Social Justice (or something)...
PS: I'm calling it, support for embedded images will be next to go.