Setting WYSIWYG Editors on... Fire!

Hey guys,

I need your feedback.

How essential is a WYSIWYG editor to your forum experience? Would a text-only editor destroy your hopes and dreams?

I know from my own experience with LF, and what I hear about editors everywhere, is that they are buggy, and create all kinds of issues.

The result is a *huge* number of editor related bugs that slow development, never seemed to get fully resolved, and create painful experiences for people when it just doesn't work right.

Questions:

Pros/cons?
Would you participate on a forum that had a text-only editor?
How much would it impact your experience?

*** Yes, I know I used bold. *** =)

 

I always turn off the WYSIWYG editor if I can, or switch to source mode if available. I personally much prefer a a basic text editor where you see the mark-up as code.

I think what VB calls the "Standard Editor" is ideal- all the advanced options but it shows up a BB Code directly in the editor.

 

I could use it or leave it, but it would depend on your forum members and how savvy they are. I remember having to field a ton of questions on code before that became an option for members.

 

I'd ideally like at least the buttons in the editor toolbar. Sorry, but remembering all the standard (and non standard) BB code is just annoying otherwise (especially when it's not written down near the reply field).

And while a WYSIWYG editor isn't as useful for me as others, I do tend to like it. Makes it more conveniant to post.

 

In what percentage of your posts do you think you actually use the editor?
Do you really get frustrated at Facebook because it's just text?

I have a working theory that the editors are much less fundamental than we realize. However, I do realize that leaves the question of how to handle quotes and code snippets, etc.

My thoughts on the average user are that they don't want to work with bbCode. In fact, I think it it has code anywhere in it's name, it's not suitable for the average user!

Side note: Since most of us are admins here, we also have a much higher likelihood of using the editor for topics we put more effort into creating for the community, compared with our user base.

 

Facebook is an excellent example!
Facebook is for casual chat. Not for on topic information explaining, discussion.
A WYSIWYG editor is not needed for casual chat. It is needed to format articles, informational answers, quotes, anything that involves lists, images. I do not care about smilies, font style, size.

 

I agree with you. My only observation is that most forum conversation, even initial posts, very closely mirrors the type of stuff that gets shared on Facebook. You just get a little bit more information at a time.

However, if you are an admin, or detailing a really long topic, I can see how formatting then could potentially become more important.

I just have this sense that if we analyze most forum threads, we're going to discover the majority have an absence of WYSIWYG type formatting and could have done without it.

I've even considered letting only admins/mods have access to our WYSIWYG editer and regular forum users just regular text.

Or what if the original topic post could be created with WYSIWYG and all replies were plain text? =)

I really believe it's possible to have a forum software without an advanced editor. Even my team is trying to convince me otherwise. I'm hoping you guys can convince me one way or another before I pull the plug. =)

 

There are very different forums. Some are social, some are informative and some are a mix. My site is mainly informative. We reward informative posts and replies and devalue non-informative posts. For informative sites like mine, an editor with formatting functionality is essential for all posts.

Maybe its valuable to make the distinction between social comments and informative posts.

I do not follow your logic about only giving the admin WYSIWYG functionality. The staff are just a few users compared to thousands / hundreds of thousands / millions of users. Moderators are not necessarily major content contributors. Depending on the community, staff may be the janitors and referee, while members contribute content.

 

Can you PM me your URL? I'd like to see the dynamic there.

 

Take a look at the stackexchange editor. For example visible in this topic: http://superuser.com/questions/567293/hang-during-reboot
They have obviously rethinked the same matter and came up with an editor which only has:

• bold
• italic
• link
• quote
• code
• image
• lists
• heading
• horizontal rule

Its very interesting to see that their editor has simple help dropdowns.
The editor also has help balloons. http://awesomescreenshot.com/0b51216pdf

 

The dynamic is simple: gamification. Promotions give wanted features. Promotions are dependent upon:

1. reputation points
2. ratings given
3. reputation points to post count ratio.

So users are stimulated / rewarded to post quality and attract points.
They are encouraged to carry out tasks and be rewarded with points (like wikitasks)
They are stimulated to rate all posts positive or negative.
They are discouraged to post low quality content.

We remove all low quality content once every few years. As we started this system in 2005, there is a massive increase in post quality over the years.

The gamification system is highly motivating and drives up activity and quality. Similar to the success of stackexchange. I believe that gamification is the next big thing for communities. Like the social web was before.

 

I voted yes on the poll on the assumption text only just meant you'd see the bbcode source, not that plain text was the only option. Would never consider a forum where only plain text was possible.

 

The help method they are using is interesting.

I'm not sure I'm a fan of the insta-preview, although I see how it helps show the result of the markup being applied with the WYSIWYG editor buttons - reducing confusion for any newbie users.

I'll have to scan through some top ranked threads and see how often it's used versus blobs of text.

 

Gamification is something we have in mind, obviously, but I also don't want to use that term too loosely. I want it (again) to be as simple as possible. I'm bored by how it's done in most forums. I'd like to think there are lots of opportunities to do some new stuff. If your forum is doing something highly effective, I'd like to have a look.

 

I suppose it could be either. Plain text with no markup, or plain text with limited markup (bbCode or otherwise).

 

Facebook does/did have an editor when it came to notes.

 

I voted no.

In today's web, plain text editors are almost a sin and BBCode is terribly old fashion (except for the replacement of smilies ) and only a small percentage of users understand how to even use BBcode. I hate writing in Wikipedia for this same reason and thus, don't do it often.

Whether or not you need a full WYSIWYG editor to just post a comment in a thread like this is debatable, but who does it hurt, if more formatting options are there?

The freedom to format at will is also much more inviting than not having any ability to format at all or only with BBCode. It is simply a great usability advantage to a WYSIWYG editor. You see what you are going to post from the start. This saves time, page loads and simply is more satisfying for almost all users. It certainly is for me!

Just my 2 cents.

Scott

 

Hi Scott,

The biggest pain for me is from the developer perspective. We have a relatively stable editor at present, but we have been plagued with issues when it was first integrated. I really was discouraged by the # of bugs that dealt directly with the editor and how extremely time consuming they were to resolve. It ate into our dev time a great deal, and my consideration would be related to how much I'd expect issues to continue in the future.

We do believe that a similar editor (for most users) is best. The more options available, the more confusion by a typical user - and the majority of posts are not going to take advantage of the formatting anyway.

We definitely do not advocate bbCode. In fact, any bbCode support from us will just be an advantage for more sophisticated users. We don't really have any intention in trying to convince a typical user to start using bbCode.

BTW - I despise Wikipedia editing. It's a waste of time, IMO. I can't imagine why they would create such a horrible editing UI. Huge props to those who bother editing there.

As you can see, we already have a very simplified editor, and we removed some stuff we originally had rather than deal with the bugs. When I get frustrated during testing, I find myself thinking (quite often)... why don't we just drop it and go with plain text?! =)

Of course, when I start thinking about the CMS components for the future, I have to keep that in mind as well. Eventually, we're going to have to solve these issues. =)

 

I hate text only editors. I managed to incorporate a wysiwyg editor into phpbb3 before the site switched to vbulletin.

It was pretty buggy so vbulletin's wysiwyg editor was welcomed heartily at qandq.

 

I really like WYSIWYG editors. I really hate messing with BBcode and crap on forums and those editors just make it easier, though I have no problems with HTML, lol.