One major complaint for regulars on the old forum was the constant need to write back to new users and explain to them how to format their code. Regular responders wrote “please format your code” or shared links to the FAQ “How to format your code” roughly 4000 times in the past few years. It might…

It would be very cool to detect this automatically. Another thing that may help is adjusting the welcome message to make it less likely that the code gets shared unformatted. In the openFrameworks forum I think the message looks like this: Hi! Welcome to %{site_name} — thanks for starting a new …

I agree we should edit the just-in-time message shown to users. One tiny thing: I’d go with bold instead of italics in the text. I’d couple this with links that explain more. Something like: Include code in the form of an MCVE and format it. See here for more info.

Great suggestions on the welcome message. I think looking at that might require an admin-level account – @fjenett

Is it wise to encourage screenshots this way? I mean, at least it could be mentioned not to screenshot error messages but to paste them directly in the forum. Also, is it possible to add, beside bold, color text in the forum? Kf

Hey, thanks for the suggestions. Will look into it this weekend.

An unformatted code detection plugin still has never materialized, but the conversation continued. Somebody on the Discourse forums created a Clippy The Paperclip that follows around a user who is flagged for unformatted code. That wouldn’t work here, but it is funny. [image] Catch and edu…

[image] jeremydouglass: Clippy The Paperclip That is awesome! :grinning:

That would definitely be a cool feature! But I don’t think there should be a penalty for bad formatting. We don’t want this site to be very restrictive to new users

Forum: catching badly formatted code posts

Site Feedback

Topic		Replies	Views
Ideas to Decrease Unformatted Code Site Feedback	14	1373	May 7, 2019
Post to test discourse features Site Feedback	8	1297	May 28, 2018
Code Format icon Site Feedback	7	819	July 11, 2024
Enabling Colored Text Site Feedback	5	978	May 25, 2018
Instructions to format code in two topics are different Site Feedback	0	172	December 9, 2023

Forum: catching badly formatted code posts

Related topics