Click the M+ button.
ETA: If you can see it. I couldn’t before, I can now.
That’s precisely what I mean by “WSYWYG mode”.
And now I see the dedicated Preview button. It wasn’t there while I was composing my previous post.
Mysterious are the ways of Discourse.
Back in the vBulletin days, people complained that it was old and clunky looking and was never updated as technology progressed.
So, if something changes, a bunch of folks complain. If nothing ever changes, a bunch of folks complain.
You can’t win. 
They have to do something, don’t they?
Or at least, they think so.
I get the distinct impression, from a number of software changes by various people in various areas, that sometimes changes are made just because the coders felt like doing something. It isn’t only Discourse.
I don’t suppose many people go into that line of work who don’t like messing around and making changes.
The fact that a high percentage of their users – probably especially so for message board users – just want the damn thing to work and don’t want to have to re-learn everything over and over, and in addition may well think given changes are not only useless but for the worse, doesn’t seem to enter into enough of the decision-making.
I’ve caught myself multiple times already. – hey, it works right for the later posts when multiquoting! or at least it did this time.
WRONG! VBB was the One True Way, and I wouldn’t mind having it back. I have no truck with themes and skins. I don’t even know what they are, and I’m uninterested in finding out.
And I’ve never felt the need for avatars (even the one-letter defaults).
I did that occasionally before this latest change. I even did it (or at least came very close to doing it) with vBulletin.
Ever think about how wonderful this planet would be if it didn’t have humans on it? 
There’s a difference between the vB days when TPTB refused to update anything and Discourse where everything gets updated regardless of whether or not we want the updates.
As Joshua (War Games) noted, not playing is an option.
It may sometimes seem that way, but there really is a middle ground between stagnation and constant tinkering. There have been dozens and dozens of significant UI changes in the time we’ve been on Discourse, and some of them – like the one currently under discussion, the disappearance of the quote function and its eventual reinstatement within a submenu, or the imminent loss of access by older browsers – have been controversial at best.
Again, I think Discourse is generally very well designed. I just wish the concept of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” wasn’t so alien to the developers.
Yup.
There is such a thing as changing things which actually are broken, and leaving alone the ones that aren’t.
Were the people who complained about no changes requesting specific changes? Were any of them saying ‘change something, I don’t care what, I’m bored?’
Admittedly, there may be a few people in that last category. Personally, I’d recommend ignoring them.
Indeed. The complaints were mainly about the fact that the vBulletin platform was becoming very unreliable and that there was no support for it.
Hello everyone! Discourse employee lurking the Site Feedback category here again. I’ve read through all this feedback and appreciate it. I can summarize some of it and bring it back to the team…
- “Hey WTF happened” — a little tip about this change may have helped
- Quotes are still funky sometimes in the WYSIWYG/A mode
- ugly monospace font — the goal (as some have guessed) was to make the difference between the two modes more apparent, with markdown being closer to code… but “who cares, it’s ugly” seems valid
(not ignoring the other points, these are just the most common)
In regard to the “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” comments… I get it, I think everyone’s that ever updated their phone has probably encountered this at one point (Apple has a doozy of an update coming this fall). It’s especially frustrating when you haven’t been made privy to the reasoning. We should work on communicating these things better.
In this case, our composer has been one of the most consistent complaints since Discourse has existed. Over the years we’ve heard from less savvy folks that they just don’t “get” the side-by-side editing… it feels too technical, they don’t like how links/images/bbcode/etc work.
Our hope is that the new composer makes Discourse more approachable and helps us keep up with ever-changing expectations of how things work on the web (which tbh, keeps us out of the dustbin where all the broken toys end up).
The good news is that the markdown editor isn’t going anywhere, we plan to keep that around for the foreseeable future, and we’re continually working on improvements to both options.
Thanks for response; that’s useful.
Now if you could just keep my old browser on the boards – (it does seem to be, so far; but I’m still getting warning banners.)
Thanks for giving us the backstage briefing. Agree that warning would have made a big difference, though. But the new monospace font is far easier to read so it’s good to hear that we’re being heard.
Thanks!
Is there something I’m missing? I make a post using the new WYSIWYG box, two minutes later I make a post and now I have the preview window and the posting box has the typewriter font.
As far as I know, I’m not changing any settings. Unless there is some keyboard shortcut and I’m fat-fingering it?
Thank you for checking in and for giving us feedback that you are listening.
In the toolbar there is an A box. It is highlighted blue. It slides left to become Mdown arrow. That selects WYSIWYG vs markdown.
I was posting that from my laptop. On my PC the same ugly and unreadable font appears. Both use SD Light as the theme on Firefox. I assume there’s a technical explanation for this.
What explanation are you looking for? Why the font is easier to read?
I can’t tell which font you are saying is ugly, and which is easier to read.