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by arthurtw
3611 days ago
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Forum anonymity (or more precisely, disposable account) is the source of moderation pain and the reason of suboptimal forum content quality. It's one of the main issues I want to address from day 1. If FB account puts a lot of people off, I may consider adopting SMS verification sooner, or change the yearly subscription to a one-time small fee. It seems Markdown editing is a red flag for broader adoption. I've thought about a dual approach before: allow casual users to edit with GUI, and provide the Markdown editing capability for pro users. I do not have a fool-proof way to prevent plugin copying. If somehow it's widely copied, it's not a bad thing (to most people), too. |
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A lot of people like to keep identities separate. Any system that tries to remove the anonymity site of things will end up stifling quite a few people who worry about their personal information being misused or who don't want everyone to know about their every activity online. That's not a bad thing, especially not in a world where intelligence agencies want to spy on everything you do, you could lose your job because of some comments on Facebook or Twitter and being swatted is sadly quite common.
Not everyone wants their friends and family to know they're an active member on say, Donald Trump Fan Forums. Or that they're posted leaked content from an upcoming game, like quite a few people on 4chan or Reddit. Or that they're interested in setting up a Tor node.
As for markdown, yeah, your solution there is exactly the solution. A GUI for new users, a raw editing text box for pro users. It's like how a lot of forum editors switch between BB code/raw text and a WYSIWYG editor.
Plugin copying is a good thing here (because the features mentioned could be good in other scripts), but I'm just warning you'll need quite a bit more if you want to differentiate themself enough from competitors in the market (of which there are thousands).