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tom.shaddock
tom.shaddock
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
October 22, 2019

Retiring BBcode from the platform

  • October 22, 2019
  • 16 replies
  • 591 views

Hey all, this is a notification announcement that we have removed BBcode parsing from the front end of the platform now. This is part of the overall transition from BBcode to HTML - a necessary change that will enable much richer and more eye catching content format of posts (yayy!).

 

At the moment we ask that you do not use BBcode in the creation of topics anymore - it will render normally in control but will not render in the front end to your end users.

 

We will of course make another announcement that the rendering of BBcode has been retired from your control environment too.

 

Any questions please just get in touch!

16 replies

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Julian
Julian
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
October 29, 2019

@Ditte

Well, I suppose that way of posting links also got retired. 

May I ask why you would prefer this way of sharing a link instead of using e.g. a keyboard shortcut (ctrl + k on windows)? Maybe I overlook something but for me that’s much easier than working with clunky bbcode?

I follow my nose, it always knows
Ditte
Ditte
Helper ⭐️⭐️
October 29, 2019

@Ditte

Well, I suppose that way of posting links also got retired. 

May I ask why you would prefer this way of sharing a link instead of using e.g. a keyboard shortcut (ctrl + k on windows)? Maybe I overlook something but for me that’s much easier than working with clunky bbcode?

Copy / pasting little snippets of ‘things we say all the time’, like the one above. Having to do that with ctrl + K a bunch of times every day is a waste of time. :( 

Currently rocking the Sonos Communities
Julian
Julian
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
October 30, 2019

Ah ok, I see, thanks for elaborating. I probably would simply copy / paste the entire hyperlink then? Of course this requires the location where you save these kind of snippets to support html as well...

I follow my nose, it always knows
Yoeri
Yoeri
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
October 30, 2019

Copy / pasting little snippets of ‘things we say all the time’, like the one above. Having to do that with ctrl + K a bunch of times every day is a waste of time. :( 

With the new editor you can copy/paste any HTML (with display text) and it will preserve both the display text and the URL.

In this example I copied an URL from the Sonos Support page: Kiezen tussen een Standaard-installatie en een Boost-installatie. (see animated .gif in spoiler)

 

 

 

If you have a set of predefined URLs that you often copy and paste you can put these as HTML links in your preferred text editor (docs, notes, paper etc.) and copy/paste from there. Hope this helps :)

Group Product Manager, Customer Communities
Jurgen
Jurgen
Helper ⭐️
October 30, 2019

@Julian Glad you're doing better again!

 

Just because one option for abuse (e.g. posting inappropriate images) is hard to turn off, this does not mean we should leave other ways (e.g. color for text) open as well. Also, while e.g. posting images is a significant (fundamental) benefit and necessary for community members to have proper discussions, changing the text color (or the size of text) is not as important. 

 

I think it’s the amount and type of users your community attracts that determines the risk of misconduct, not the amount of options for abuse users have. In fact, a bare bones community platform might inspire abuse more so than a fully featured one.

Text color may be a low stakes feature overall, but it’s a feature that’s common on community platforms, one that Insided provided up until now via BBcode and one that power users like and expect. I kind of expect one of the oldest community platform providers to know this. 

If you'd at least announced this change and you would have made your case, we would have been able to present it to our user base before the fact instead of shocking them with this change. I'm not convinced about the performance impact of BBcode seeing 1 example of an issue. I'm not convinced about the risks of temporarily providing a color picker for all either. But after reading your last comments, I'm at least a bit more understanding about your line of reasoning.

 

For reasons mentioned above, we think it is a better approach to give you the option to turn this on based on user role - an improvement we plan to add in the future.

 

The future is long and the wish list is big, so I don’t think we should expect to see a feature very soon if you think it isn’t "a significant (fundamental) benefit” …

 

Jurgen
Jurgen
Helper ⭐️
October 30, 2019

Copy / pasting little snippets of ‘things we say all the time’, like the one above. Having to do that with ctrl + K a bunch of times every day is a waste of time. :( 

With the new editor you can copy/paste any HTML (with display text) and it will preserve both the display text and the URL.

In this example I copied an URL from the Sonos Support page: Kiezen tussen een Standaard-installatie en een Boost-installatie. (see animated .gif in spoiler)

 

 

 

If you have a set of predefined URLs that you often copy and paste you can put these as HTML links in your preferred text editor (docs, notes, paper etc.) and copy/paste from there. Hope this helps :)

 

I noticed a moderator had the same challenge and I suggested the same solution :) You can't use notepad for your snippets anymore though, as notepad doesn't support HTML links. (Re)using uploaded images and gifs was also easy using BBcode. Using images from external sources is not possible anymore at all.

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