h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was just thinking that it might be nice, in the next version of h2g2, if you made it so we could have some formatting (bold, italic, underline) in the forums? There have been quite a few times when I've wanted to underline something and had to do _this_ instead. On the other hand, this might just be something too technically difficult, or just a bad idea. Most of my suggestions so far have been, but for some reason I keep trying.

It is a good idea. I know I'd for one like to see it. I believe that the Towers tried a few ways to stop certain codes and such, and people found ways around it, so that in the end they just shut out code completley.
At the moment the tech team is rather limited in numbers, I think it's now either one or two. So the idea will go on the infamous To Do list if it isn't there already.

I like it though, it shouldn't be too difficult to allow certain tags through, depending on what method they use. It would however slow the forums down somewhat as the parser formats each tag. I bit like when you come across a forum that has a Lot of smilies in, it takes longer to load than one that doesn't have any in.

We did consider this a while ago, and decided against it - can't remember why. I can stick it on the list for another look, but it might be a speed thing; anything that adds to theparsing slows things down, and right now we could do without anything that slows the site down.

Mark

If I recall correctly, and I believe I do, there were two major reasons not to implement forum formatting:

- something about problems with the current forum format regarding adding formatting
- most importantly, database and server load

Formatting takes time to process - everything written in GuideML has to be translated into HTML before it comes to your browser. This takes processor time and memory, disk access and everything else as well. Adding formatting to the forums would drastically increase this load - I believe the load for smilies is pretty enormous as it is - especially when people use loads and loads of smilies in their posts - each one's a database lookup if it's implemented anything like I think it is.

That's the one. Smileys are relatively easy; we do a search and replace so things like : - ) turn into the XML for that smiley (ie the SMILEY tag). However converting something like *bold text* into bold text is slightly more time consuming, and what happens if someone uses a * without wanting it to mean bold?

So why not support GuideML markup in Postings? It's not that simple; we use the same parser for Postings as for text-only entries, and that works well. We also don't want to support all of GuideML in Postings - they'd be really slow and sometimes painful to read.

Anyway, it might be added in the future some time, but not while the database is anything but lightning speed. We'll keep an eye on it, though.