Stop allowing post text formatting
 

Every time I've seen large or small font sizes, or text colors other than black in a post, the effect was annoying and gratuitous.

Here is the latest example:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/#post4209507

I recommend that we no longer allow posts to contain any text effects other than italics and bolding. We should remove both the ability to change font sizes, and the ability to change text color.

I agree about the fonts and sizes, except that I think there should be a fixed width option as I mentioned here.

Colours are occasionally useful to highlight small changes to code, perhaps a button for the [highlight] tag could replace the colour box?

In the name of $DEITY ...
Fully agree about the aggravation caused by font size abuse.
I would like to see the maximum size available to users limited to +1.

Totally disagree about the usefulness of color -- with it you can:

• Soften, literally, potentially misunderstood remarks. "Silver" & "Gray" are good for this.
• De-emphasize OT (off topic) remarks. Again, "Silver" & "Gray" are good for this.
• Hide notes or even rudeness by making their color the same as the background. -- COLOR="#E6E6E6" for LQ gray, #CFD9FF for blue.
• Indicate an edit.
• Indicate a moderator's edit or official request. -- (Very important to me. :))
• Occasional emphasis.
• Festive Holiday Greetings :)

Note that the "horrible example" cited has been voluntarily fixed by the OP.
Can anyone find 3 good examples of color abuse that is separate from font size abuse?

I am curious if our huge font complaints are about something that is really under the control of our browsers; & therefore we could solve this problem w/ a better knowledge of CSS using local style sheets?

Homework :tongueincheek:
Find the fully hidden remark.
Extra credit: Explain how.

It was a while ago and I can't find them now, but I do remember seeing posts that were entirely in some hard to read colour like yellow, or cyan for no apparent reason.

I remember one written entirely in red text (presumably for emphasis). No, I'm not going to look for it.

In this case (what I quoted here by ntubski), I agree - to me the colors are HORRIBLE, and make me want to barf or have an aneurysm.

However, I do remember a specific case a year or two ago, wherein a newbie OP was creating their posts ENTIRELY in the most brutal of clashing colors. After some comments about the colors, I contacted the OP on the subject, and learned that they were visually impaired in some way, and in order to be able to comfortably view & read what they were posting, they opted for certain colors which unfortunately, most of us found to be terrible.

The above would qualify as "use", rather than "abuse", and a case like this is enough in my opinion, to leave the colors alone. We don't get that much color abuse that we need to eliminate it. But I did suggest to the visually impaired OP that in their posts, they explain their need for the bad colors up front, to prevent repeated incidents of their threads getting sidetracked by complaints about the colors.

As for +HUGE font size, I don't think we need gigantic fonts (maybe there's a case for them? I dunno) - but some larger-than-standard sizes are handy when used as section headers, or to emphasize "WARNING:" or "NOTE:" or similar whatnots, to further distinguish them from surrounding text.

:twocents:

ntubski,

I agree about "yellow" & "cyan", that just means that good taste & good sense are needed in choosing colors.


GrapefruiTgirl,

Good point about visually impaired users.

The problems of the visually impaired user might be solved by using a browser like Opera, which has at least 3 special styles:

• Accessibility Layout
• High Contrast (B/W)
• High Contrast (W/B)

specifically to help w/ vision problems.

BTW, how did that visually impaired user read the "normal" posts at LQ?
Any memory of what was special about composing compared to just reading?

Nope, I have no idea regarding their ability to read other 'normal' posts around LQ, and didn't press them about details of their impairment. In retrospect, I guess they didn't do a whole lot of reading of other threads in general - rather, they had an issue of their own, posted it for help, and didn't do a whole lot of other LQ browsing.

As for composing vs reading - again I speculate, but perhaps they may have composed in their bad colors, posted it so they could more easily proof-read what they'd written, then did any editing as required.

Cheers!

One then wonders how they managed to read the replies to their thread(s) (assuming, of course that there were replies).

I think it would be good to remove the formatting. However, there could be someone with poor eyesight that needs to use large fonts (however rare this may be). Edit: actually, no, this case isn't similar to GrapefruiTgirl's example. I suppose a user finding it difficult to read the small fonts can always make the text in their browser bigger (this is definitely an option in Firefox and I imagine it's standard in other browsers).

For the record, here's the thread I referred to:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...2008-a-786155/

And P.S. - I had implied in my post above that there were some number of comments in that thread about the colors; however there had been only one, and I have edited my above post.

How could blue on blue text possibly have been better for a visually impaired user than black-on-blue text? The poster was probably lying.

If you feel you really have to read it, just use the quote button. Else ignore it.
I normally refuse to read (assist) posts/threads using stupid fonts/sizes/colour (mis)usage.

Censorship ain't the answer.

I don't know how they could have preferred it. Maybe they liked the slightly different contrast? Or the blue being slightly softer than the black? I suppose we'd need to look through their eye(s) at a computer, to understand.

Really, no idea, but I wasn't going to argue with them, and felt there was no reason to presume they would use some particular selection of colors and then lie about the reasoning behind it, just for the heck of it.. The reason they gave was good enough for me at the time. Maybe some other visually impaired members will comment on this, and/or on colors in general...

Cheers!

Definitely in Konqueror & Opera, not sure about Chrome.

BTW, out of the box Opera doesn't just boost the font size, it magnifies the whole page, including images, by 10% of the orig. size w/ each bump. It also has a "Fit to Width" option to minimize horizontal scrolling.

The crucial question for future cases is:
Why do you need to use bold colors when writing your posts, but not when reading our posts?


Just for Fun
Total Posts: 4,050
Posts Per Day: 1.79
On my way back to 2.00 ppd :-D

FWIW, I'm partially vision impaired, and quite frankly the "softer" colors only blur the text, and the bright ones are downright painful. I vote to disable them.

Cheers

If it's not too personal, what's the impairment; & what colors are best for you?

I have acute astigmatism in my left eye ("legally" blind), and moderate astigmatism in my right eye. I'm also far-sighted. While prescription reading glasses work a charm with normal text and link colors and some darker "off" colors, they magnify the brilliance of lighter colors and cause the blurriness. Bright colored text, such as yellow, is almost equivalent to shining a flashlight in my eyes.

Thanks for the feedback. I've removed some of the larger options from the size dropdown, which should cut down on some of the most egregious abuses. Unfortunately in the current system there is no option to limit the usage by usergroup or set a maximum size. If there's sufficient demand it's possible we'd add this, but I don't think turning it off across the entire site is the best answer.

--jeremy

I almost made that type of argument about Sasha's example, but I don't have your problem, so I didn't know if the argument was valid. I do, OTOH, have hyperacusis & can get nearly homicidal in the presence of loud noises, e.g. shouting people.

Would take a look at Sasha's example & tell me if those colors are hard on your eyes? TIA.


jeremy,

Good choice, I think we can deal w/ the rest of it case-by-case.

Thank you for your concern Rick, and yes, I had to strain to read that. I couldn't look at it very long. I can't comment on other people's impairments except to say if the OP needed that style and color to see text, how did they read Sasha's reply?

Cheers

archtoad6,

I sent you a PM re:
:D

Sasha,

Quit shouting at me -- you know how much it hurts! :D :D :D

Seriously, thanks for the PM, a reply is on its way.

Never got a good answer, the OP there took my questions as a personal attack, perhaps because I also questioned the legality of the OQ (original question :)), which had to do w/ ripping a copy protected CD that she insisted is legal. The discussion went nowhere, & I decided to drop the matter in the interests of harmony.


Color Summary
The crucial question for future cases is:
Why do you need to use bold colors when writing your posts, but not when reading our posts?
or
How do you normally read the 'Net?-- What is special about composing a post at LQ that is different from your other browsing activities?

Possible comment:
Suggestions for refining the above comment on color are welcome.


Size comment, probably not polite enough to use
Again, refinement suggestions welcome.

Even as a new member i'm going to disagree. In any case policies could be updated to enable per-user restrictions in case of abuse. That way a wide majority of users that do use sane formatting still can have the feature.

Juako

Why should colors be used for making things lighter? Seems like it would be a better idea to have a tag that makes text fainter.

Also, there already is bold and italics for emphasis.

Speaking about font abuse: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...46#post4214546

uh that post was the newsbot, possibly a hiccup in the article or something like that, the reply i agree is font abuse

The text in the post of the bot is not the same as in the linked article, so I assumed that the post was edited.

The post was not edited, and I'm not sure how that made it into the feed. The size element has been removed.

--jeremy

Found another news-bot post with huge text in it here.

The post in question, dated "Yesterday, 06:27 PM", uses [size=7] -- I thought anything larger than "2" had been disabled by then. IAC, I reported it.