Dear Woltlab Burning Boards and whatever the fuck Smashboards uses, as well as countless other websites that have this stupid, nasty tendency to use What You See Is What You Get editors only:
Why is there no decent alternative to WYSIWYG?
Seriously, why? WYSIWYG is awful. I have no idea whatsoever how it caught on, because working with it is just nasty. It’s phenomenally difficult to edit your text like that. Want to include a link? Well, better select the text to apply it to and have some text after that, because otherwise the entire rest of your post will be made up of that link, unless you remove it and try again later. I keep on considering writing something in italics, and of course because I can’t see the BBCode tags, when I delete it and start typing again, that’s in italics too. Lovely.
And then there’s the way it overrides the browser’s native “undo” function. Somehow pressing ctr+z doesn’t just undo the last X amount of deleting or writing I did, it resets the post to the last draft. Because that is totally what I wanted to do and that’s totally how the undo button works in every word processor and input field ever. As someone who writes on these forums extensively, this bothers me. To put it nicely.
Seriously, what’s wrong with BBCode? It’s simple, self-explanatory, easy to format and manage, and if you’re smart about it (like vBulletin and disturbingly few other forum softwares), you can use hotkeys to insert it into your text really fast. Sure, you have to know something about how the forum works, but it’s a small price to pay to not have to deal with not being able to move said code tags around at all.
Oh, what’s this? You do have a raw text version? Oh, and it not only doesn’t have hotkeys for BBCode like the WYSIWYG version, but doesn’t even have the damn buttons for them?!
Up yours, Woltlab. Your software sucks.