I like Markdown but in order to make Loomio easier for everyone I guess a WYSIWYG editor would be welcome.

It would be good to have an option to remove markdown from the RSS/Atom feeds because many feed readers don't handle it and it makes it harder to integrate the feed to web sites as an additional step to parse/convert markdown into text or html is required.

@simon1 look where you write a post and to the bottom right there is a tick box Markdown. The help link takes you here https://help.github.com/articles/markdown-basics/

Using markdown I can write the link like this

Look at the help link for more info.

@lbjoum Thanks for trying to explain markdown and pointing me to more information. Markdown is obviously pretty useful for programmers, etc but I'm afraid the help link didn't help someone like me who doesn't programme.

Yeah, @Simon1 that's kind of what I was afraid of. The barrier is pretty high and it isn't as intuitive as WYSIWYG editors that everyone on the planet is used to using. I guess the only places I ever use something like it are on Github or maybe Stack Overflow - which are websites pretty exclusive to programmers.

Just found out that there are at least 84 occurrences of "uses_markdown" in the codebase (68 in the code and 16 in the spec), so I doubt it will be going away. The question is how can it be made more useable for those who don't know what, how or why? Would something like this help?

Testing for github issue

I love Markdown, and there's no reason for it to be harder to use. There are a ton of editors that are a cross between markdown and wysiwyg, like this one, which I think has a great balance (it has a preview mode too!).

@george2 Nice catch with that editor!

Markdown is cool. But I don't believe it is general purpose. It's for people who love/live in plain text.

Ideally we'd have a super simple wysiwyg editor with a minimal ui, support for drag and drop of images and smart paste support of other text.

Also want to have link inspection, so when you paste a link we preview it, and embed videos etc.

In the meantime markdown can provide formatting support for those who invest time to learn how to do it.. but it's not accessible enough for everyone, so we need to keep that in mind.

I totally agree with you @gregorycassel - the thing that concerns me though is code-debt with database entries full of markdown flavoured texts...

I mostly do not understand the opposition to Markdown. It's not like people have to use it in their messages.

Also, the question is, Do you like and use markdown?, not "Should Loomio ship with a WYSIWYG Markdown editor?" nor "Would Markdown be easier to generate for non-technical users if it had a GUI?"

Wouldn't we consider markdown a poor choice if it offers useful features that the average end user doesn't understand or know how to use?

@BenBurton With or without a GUI to help generate it?

With a GUI I'm guessing end users would understand how to use it, moving it into the "useful" category.

@BenBurton I agree. So, then, why the opposition to this proposal?

@ryangillespie Should the proposal be clarified? Would you and your users be happy if there were something like https://www.loomio.org/d/ag9nP5hG/markdown-love-it#comment-474306 instead of the way it is now?

I have to say that I tend to agree with @BenBurton as well, and the reason why I didn't phrase the proposal as just suggested by @elimisteve is that I felt that that direction would be leading the discussion instead of allowing the participants to come up with that organically. Of course we could phrase a decision that way...

As long as there is some sort of GUI, I'm not opposed to markdown. I just am thinking about folks who will never understand/learn Markdown in order to stylize comments. I'm thinking more of the way it is currently implemented in Loomio which I would like to see made easier for those users.

+1 to wrapping it in a GUI though to make it more accessible.

**I don't like Markdown because we can't put in bold a whole text with multiple paragraphs.

Example.**

I would prefer tags like [b] ... [/b].

@joshuavial I hereby +1 your +1 regarding a GUI to aid accessibility.

@denjello my understanding is that markdown was designed for people instead of parsers.

taken from the Markdown introduction,

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.