Initial thoughts on assisted formatting of discussion posts
Reading this discussion post is making me imagine specifying a discussion-formatting tool. In the fan community of the game Skyrates, we had a tool for taking chat logs from the in-game chat and formatting them for pretty display on web or forum. A similar tool could be used to simplify making chats into posts here.
The basic workflow is to paste a chat log into the tool, then use some combination of auto detection and interactive controls to prettify it into a post.
Besides reducing the formatting work, it could be possible to add fun features, like:
Introducing participants by full name the first time they speak, and by abbreviation afterwards
Linking those intros to account profiles on the site
Colorizing names to mnemonically double-code participants
It would be necessary for the paste input to recognize Facebook and Discord formats. Beyond that I don’t know where rationalists tend to chat.
I would think that the next step on this would be to review the prior art and available off the shelf solutions.
Due to limitations of the Less Wrong mobile editor it is tragically impossible not to end this post with a paragraph of only the letter “t”.
t
This has been an experiment in
writing a post on LW 2
Writing with the LW 2 mobile editor
Verdict: the mobile editor is very painful, but setting the editor aside, the actual posting process is pleasant enough.
There’s no way to access the submit comment button in portrait on mobile. Workaround: landscape.
I’ve been able to get to the “Submit Comment” button on mobile in portrait (by tapping elsewhere to exit the editor before doing so), but my problem has been that the text box tends to lose all my progress oh, every other character or so. As a result, this comment has been copied and pasted from Google Keep.
Thanks for the more convenient workaround. That’ll help when I do manage to compose a comment.
Yeah, I need to rework the mobile editor sometime soon. It’s one of the most common complaints we get.