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Funny, I don't see Team Bob in the listed line-up.
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We've had a number of complaints that a member will spend a great deal of time crafting a response to a question in Quick Answers[^] only to hit the post button and find the question was deleted or closed while they were answering it.
In a perfect world everyone would agree on what's suitable for answering and what's suitable for closing, but our world is far from perfect. Effective today we've added a feature that will re-open a question that's been closed if someone posts an answer to that question.
We could have implemented question locks, but locks are messy.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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We've launched a small change to Quick Answers[^]. When posting a question you get the usual "Subject" and "describe the problem" boxes, but we've also added a "What have you tried?" box that must be filled in before you can post your question.
It makes it harder to post a question (barely) by forcing the poster to think a little about what they've done so far. It allows those answering to avoid things already tried and suggest new ideas. It will also, possibly, act as a self-identifier of those too lazy to explain their problem to those eager to help.
We'll see. It's all about trying something new.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Sounds cool Chris.
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Thanks Chris, Its really good move. It helps questions to become more self-explanatory and avoid same solution that already tried by OP, Additionally it avoid spam post and lazy questions. Most of the time in CP, I have seen questions with title "Please solve it urgently" or "error in c# application" with same description as title. (though I tried to "IMPROVE" it but due to less description, it remains unclear)
Members should take its benefits and can improve the question quality to help them resolve quickly.
Finally "More time to explain question will help to reduce time to resolve it"
Find More .Net development tips at : .NET Tips
The only reason people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.
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We've launched a new article section[^] that will allow you to contribute articles containing live JavaScript. At this point we're restricting it to just online tools in order to test the idea and get community feedback. If things go we'll we'll look to extend this to all article sections.
cheers
Chris Maunder
modified 5-Aug-15 12:19pm.
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I am not sure whether articles require this or not (perhaps after reading a few it does seem a good idea). But I am very much considering this to be applied to Quick Answers' answering box (or to any post editor, including this reply editor). Rather than uploading the data to servers and then formatting it after every character insertion, you should add the JavaScript power on the client-side.
As far as the links are concerned (copy/pasting the link). I would recommend, instead of sending a request to get the title. You should leave that to server when poster is done editing the post to update the content of that link to a title (if from CodeProject). Like Markdown! It would make it a lot better. Plus, it would give you an opportunity to add link titles for posts from other sites by reading their <title> tag.
For example, just to edit this messages for you, I have sent like 15 requests with 1kb+ size. For me, it doesn't matter, but for someone with a metered connection, it does. This size also increases with the increase of characters. (Right now it is 2.3kb and growing for each request).
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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The reason we do Ajax calls for formatting is because we want to ensure the colourisation is done properly. We could simply skip the formatting, or use something like syntaxhighlighter to do some rough colourising. It's been discussed many times.
Another fly in the ointment is that not all markdown implementations are the same. I'm still trying to find an implementation that suits our needs, and trying to find a matching pair Javascript implementation could be a challenge.
If you're worried about postback size then uncheck the "Show a live message preview as you type (not available < IE9)" checkbox in your Settings[^] (under the Forums tab)
cheers
Chris Maunder
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With regret we've abandoned using CommonMark to render our messages.
CommonMark is meant to fix the issues inherent in other Markdown implementations while being true to the core ideas of Markdown. Basically: it should just work, there should be no surprises, and it should work with existing HTML. Markdown / CommonMark handles the main gruntwork of text formatting and when you need some fine tuning just throw in some HTML and you're good to go.
Unfortunately CommonMark handles PRE (i.e. Preformatted) blocks in a manner that simply doesn't work for us. A PRE block should (at least in my book) allow you to enter text and have the formating maintained as-is. On CodeProject we cheat a little[^] and allow things like B, EM and U tags for those who want to highlight sections of code, but beyond that what is entered is what appears.
In CommonMark a PRE block that contains text that is indented 4 spaces will trigger the creation of a <pre><code> pair that wraps the indented block as if it were a code sample. Code samples are often indented, so whenever you paste code into a PRE block then you'll more than likely get nested PRE blocks.
This just doesn't work for us. We love what CommonMark is doing to provide consistency, but that's just seems an odd decision. For now we're disabling Markdown in Quick Answers and reverting back to MarkdownSharp.
This makes me sad.
Previous message:
We announced the introduction of Markdown[^] into the forums and Quick Answers a while ago, but we were never truly happy with the implementation of the Markdown processor in use. Ambiguities, lack of standards, and poor performance of the Markdown transformer were niggling annoyances.
CommonMark[^] seeks to address these issues by introducing an unambiguous standard spec that developers can work against to create fast, efficient and reliable Markdown processors[^].
The syntax is slightly different[^] to that of Markdown, but the changes are small enough that it should, hopefully, not cause any problems. As always if you do come across issues let me know and we'll season to taste.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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It doesn't help spelling though, I see.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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Yuo think not?
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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We now support Gravatars for your profile picture to help reduce the pain in maintaining your latest profile selfie (or professional studio shot - whichever). Just setup (or update) your Gravatar pic and then on your settings page select "Use my Gravatar", hit update, and you're done.
cheers
Chris Maunder
modified 11-May-15 9:42am.
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hyperlink is invalid/incorrect/typo error for Gravatar.
We should be building great things that don't exist-Lary Page
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Thanks - fixed.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Nice. Updated my profile.
Small issue with your post Chris. Please update.
Quote: We now support Gravatars Here the URL of Gravatars has / instead of . (dot).
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m liking it.just uploaded my Gravatar.
Thanks
Do not forget to comment and rate the article if it helped you by any means.
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We'll add it to Quick Answers soon, too, but for now here's a refreshed on Markdown:
We use GitHub flavoured Markdown with a couple of minor changes. Here's the gist:
Heading (or use #Heading)
=======
And a Sub-heading (or use ##Sub-Heading
-----------
#### Use #, ##, ###, ####, ##### for H1 - H5 headings
Paragraphs are separated by a blank line.
A single newline will not cause a line break.
Leave 2 spaces at the end of a line to force a
line break
Text attributes *italic*, **bold**, ``code``, --strikethrough-- are supported, as is <font color=red>HTML</font>.
```cs
// To insert code, use ``` before the code and then end with a closing ```.
// To specify language, use ```cs or ```javascript etc as the opener
int length = new string("A string").Length;
```
Hyperlinks are easy: [link to CodeProject](http://www.codeproject.com).
Unordered list:
- apples
- oranges
- pears and stuff
Numbered list:
1. apples
2. oranges
3. pears
Produces:
Heading (or use #Heading)
And a Sub-heading (or use ##Sub-Heading
Use #, ##, ###, ####, ##### for H1 - H5 headings
Paragraphs are separated by a blank line. A single newline will not cause a line break.
Leave 2 spaces at the end of a line to force a
line break
Text attributes italic, bold, code , strikethrough are supported, as is HTML.
int length = new string("A string").Length;
Hyperlinks are easy: link to CodeProject.
Unordered list:
- apples
- oranges
- pears and stuff
Numbered list:
- apples
- oranges
- pears
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Awesome Was looking for this since a long time !
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How to produce asterisks around a word? Because It gives me italic word instead of what I want. For example: @beep@ (replace @ with *). Thank you.
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Escape with "\"
So to write *hi* you'd write \*hi\*
cheers
Chris Maunder
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I've loved Ace[^] forever. It's one of those pieces of code which, when I first saw it in action, I couldn't even begin to think how they managed to do it in a manner that didn't bring the entire browser to its knees. But it works and it works very, very well.
I'm happy to announce that after a cold, lazy evening, a few Google searches, some beer[^] and a bit of swearing I've added Ace as the Source editor to our online WYSIWYG editor for articles.
Editing articles is meant to be a WYSIWYG affair but it's never the case with HTML. Us control freaks always want to dig into the markup and make it just right. With Ace we now have that markup syntax colourised which helps enormously when your article's getting a little long. On top of that we get line numbers, tag matching, and real-time validation.
Of course, if it's just not working for you there's an "ace" button next to the "Source" button that allows you to deactivate Ace if it's causing problems.
Please let me know if you experience any issues.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Our article voting system has evolved progressively. From one person, one vote to a weighted system, to requiring comments when down-voting, to a system that statistically removed junk votes, and then lately to a system that recognised that voting patterns are not only bell curves, but sometimes, legitimately, bimodal.
We have, to a large degree, been successful at suppressing malicious down-voting. Too successful, it seems, and the article voting system is now massively weighted towards up-votes rather than down-votes. To up-vote you merely click the 4 or 5 rating. To down-vote you need to add a comment, and if your down-vote doesn't agree with the majority then your vote may not be counted until a sufficient number of other members have likewise voted the article down.
So while up-voting is great in that it rewards authors and gives readers a way to say thanks, up-votes are bad when the up-votes are not votes based on the technical merit of an article but instead based on being the author's friend, family or colleague. Make it 50 friends, family members or colleagues and the vote for a given article is hopelessly invalid.
Basically: you can have too much of a good thing. It's easy to up-vote, hard to down-vote, and so the average article rating goes up and the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff goes down.
Starting today we're removing a barrier on down-voting. You are no longer forced to provide a comment when down-voting. We have our historical-based expectations on what will happen but will be monitoring the results closely just in case.
Our concerns are limited to just a few issues: Random down-votes from bored members, for starters. The filters on outlier votes are still in place and so will help with this. Down-vote wars were also a consideration, but we're not, yet, making voters public. Any abuse of the voting system breaches our Terms of Use and we will not hesitate to close accounts that practice voting abuse. The only other concern is the lack of constructive criticism that came along with down-votes. Down-voting helps the community decide what's good and what's not, but the comment helps the author learn and grow and provide a better article to the community.
The change is effective as of now. As always we're open to suggestions and ideas to make it even better.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Why not separate it into two different rating systems? A fast one, without any comments and barriers, and a more complete option, like a review, with the score plus suggestions/criticism.
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We have an occasional issue whereby an author will get their friends, family, colleagues, and random people off the street to vote for their article. Our voting system[^] is geared towards handling a case where lots of people say "this is great" and a few downvoters say "boo, it's crap" by filtering out the outliers on the assumption that the group vote rules.
However, when you have 50 low rep voters saying "it's a 5" and 5 high rep voters saying "this is terrible (or dangerous)" then we need to adjust. The change we've made is that if a certain number of high rep members vote a certain way then no votes of that given score will be filtered out. The naysayers will be allowed to nay-say and balance will be restored.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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