The discussion revolves around disabling HTML entities in posts on a Discourse forum, particularly during the migration of an email-based web framework mailing list. farmdawgnation seeks a way to prevent HTML from being rendered in posts, as the imported mbox files contain unescaped HTML that could cause issues. pfaffman suggests encoding HTML tags or modifying the import script, but farmdawgnation notes the complexity of distinguishing HTML from email content. eviltrout clarifies that there’s no built-in mode to disable HTML entities, though posts can be marked as HTML to bypass processing. farmdawgnation wants a solution that escapes HTML before Markdown processing, possibly via a plugin. sam confirms this is feasible but would result in non-CommonMark output, which farmdawgnation acknowledges as an acceptable trade-off for certain communities.
I’m working on trying to migrate a google group to a Discourse forum and am having some issues with HTML being posted in emails. The mailing list is for a web framework, so folks posting HTML back and forth is pretty common. Since the emails we’re trying to import were coming from a system that didn’t support markdown, these HTML segments wouldn’t include code fences around them and there are too many to manually edit.
As a compromise, I’d like to disable HTML entities in posts completely. While searching the forum for this I saw @codinghorror mention that @eviltrout added a mode where this was possible, but I couldn’t find the magic setting in my admin panel.
Does anyone know how to flip Discourse into this mode?
Without thinking about it too hard, I think that the thing to do might be to encode the HTML tags before the import. It sounds like it might be safe enough to just convert all of the <s and >s into <s and >s.
That’s true. Although I’ll admit I’m also concerned about folks interacting with our community via email. Including HTML without a fence should, ideally, only render uncolored HTML. Anything else will likely cause frustration.
Oh. That’s a bigger problem. I have a BS in computer science and a PhD in education. I have learned that programming people is lots harder than programming computers.
There’s no mode to disable HTML entities that I recall. There is a type of post you can mark as HTML (see the mbox importer for an example) and no cooking or processing will be done.
Got it. I don’t think that would be desirable either.
What I really need is something that, upon seeing raw HTML in a post, will escape the HTML before the Markdown processor converts Markdown to HTML. In poking around the code I noticed that there’s a tags whitelist of sorts, so I could see just disabling that as a possibility. Or, potentially, preprocessing the text before the markdown processor runs.
Are either of these doable in the form of a plugin?
Yeah the new markdown engine has a rule for dealing with HTML tags it could be replaced in a plugin, but what you would have at the end of the process is not CommonMark, it is some sort of mister hydra
