I just saw a warning in a post in politics. I am not opening this post to discuss the moderation. But I noticed two things.
First, the text wasn’t in red (or otherwise sticking out from the rest of the thread). At the time, the post was the newest post in the thread. I recognized the moderator. IMO, that sort of text should be in red, or something like that.
Second, I think the post should have quoted the person being warned (that person would then get an email). Unless I’m wrong; perhaps people being warned get a PM.
FYI you can demonstrate formatting without injecting spaces by preceding the tag brackets [, ], <, & > you want to inactivate with a backslash \ which is the escaping character. Once escaped they just display as their plain characters without doing their formatting magic.
So entering
<ins>green</ins> and <del>pink</del>
displays as
green and pink
All I did was inject a single \ backslash ahead of each of the 8 square or angle brackets on the first line. Displaying things so they look exactly as they must be typed makes it easier for our more tech-challenged members to cut/paste your examples or just type them verbatim.
All the moderation posts I’ve seen have a yellow background, which I think is more attention-getting and less eye-straining than red text. I’m using the Straight Dope Light theme – I’m not sure either whether the appearance is the same across all themes.
Dark-brown
Disco Classic-yellow
graceful-extremely pale green/ almost not visible
Material Design- pale yellow
Minima-yellow
Sam’s Simple-yellow
SD Dark- green yellow
SD Light-yellow
Vincent-darkish grey
The purpose, as alluded to by the tag names “ins” and “del”, it to show inserts and deletions between two versions of the same primary text. It’s change tracking. Tinting may be the visual result, but it’s not the semantic intent.
So …
When I look go my Activity page and look at my earlier post that uses ins & del to achieve pink & green I see something totally different.
Instead of the highlight tints I see here, the inserted stuff is shown as underlined and the deleted stuff is shown as strikethrough.
Something we all need to bear in mind much more than we did with vBulletin is that each theme on each class of device (phone, tablet, laptop/desktop) may be displaying very differently. With 9 themes times 3 classes of devices times however many brands of browser, there’s a lot of room for your post-it-and-look-at-the-results testing to be valid across only a small slice of the total audience.
And now I’ve/we’ve discovered that different pages in the UI may well display the same formatting differently even on the very same device / browser / theme.
Or highlight the text and use the </> symbol from the dialogue box, which puts an invisible backwards apostrophe ` before and after the text (or just type the character manually) and has the same result. But your way is easier.
The backwards apostrophe (or backtick in IT-speak) is the signal for preformatted text which mostly means things like examples of computer commands which I suppose these markup commands really are. It does have the effect of escaping the 4 special brackets, but it also changes the font of all the text to a non-proportional = monospaced font that looks “videoterminal- or teletype -like”. For example: this is an example of text inside backticks. This is after the last backtick.
Here’s how to list the contents of a folder in old-fashioned DOS: C:\SomeFolder\>dir *.*
Within the single-backtick region you can’t make the text your end-user should type look like their normal text. That’s the biggest downside IMO of using the backtick method. Compare:
backslashes: To make something underlined type [u]your text here[/u].
versus
backticks: To make something underlined type [u]your text here[/u].
Further FYI for anyone still listening …
The big brother of backtick is the triple backtick on a line by itself. When you put those on separate lines as bookends, that treats all lines between them as a block quote of programming code with all the embedded spacing preserved, certain terms automatically highlighted, colored, etc, etc. Like so:
bool SomeFunction(int a, string b) { // This is a nonsense function
var c = a== 0 ? b : "other" ;
if (b== null) {
var d= " it's null" ;
} else
var e = " I've got spaces in me" ;
}
return a == (int)42.0;
}
I did not do any of that coloring or bolding; Discourse did all that. I did do all the varying indents and the gratuitous extra spaces between some words.