I’m starting a new Discourse forum for my audience, which is composed of about 50K teachers. Many of them won’t know how to use Markdown or HTML or BBCode language, and even though Markdown isn’t particularly difficult to use, it’s still not a great user experience for those unfamiliar with this language. It muddies the waters. I want to disable this feature for my regular users. How do I do this? I’m not finding anything concrete that shows me or my devs how to do this.
I used to be an education professor, so I have some idea what your audience is like. I think they’ll be OK and that you don’t need to worry.
There is no disabling markdown, but as you know Markdown is designed to be pretty much what you’d type if you didn’t have a GUI. Your users can just type stuff and leave a blank line between paragraphs. The biggest problem you’re likely to have is those people who still think that you need to type five spaces at the beginning of a paragraph.
You could contrive to use CSS to hide the toolbar in the composer, but I think that’ll make things worse.
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Simply ignore it altogether and type words, like this.
There’s no requirement to use formatting (bold, italic, etc) versus simply typing words and sentences. It shouldn’t get in your way – is it? If it is, can you provide some examples?
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