After installation, users posting unformatted code will see a warning message instructing them how to format it correctly.
Sensitivity and whether it detects HTML are configurable via theme settings.
Debugging
If you receive a warning for a post which doesnât include any text, you can print debug information by opening the browser JS console, and typing debugUnformattedCodeDetector()Enter. This will print some information about which lines were considered âcodeâ, and what the sensitivity settings are.
Issues
âDo not show this message againâ only works per device, not per user. This is a known issue and will be fixed once Discourse gains the functionality to attach user info from themes.
This is quite essential to our forum due to the fact that many new users ignore our topic about code formatting and most of our topics are about assistance in code. It makes our life much easier by informing them of informatted code. Thanks @lionel-rowe
v0.5 is now out. Iâm gonna start documenting changes properly on this topic. I expect most updates from now will be dealing with edge cases.
Changelogs
v0.5
Fix false positive on URLs containing snake case (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/JavaScript/Client-side_web_APIs/Client-side_storage)
v0.6
Fix two more types of URL-related false positives:
Parens in path (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_(disambiguation))
It will recognize logs as code if they happen to âlook likeâ code (i.e. contain any of the patterns that would flag a post as containing code). You can test it out on your content at the demo link.
There are lots of ways to format a datetime, and not all log formats start each line with a datetime in any case. I guess detecting full ISO8601 representations (1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 etc.) would work, as these are very unlikely to appear outside of code or logs.
Anything in code blocks (fenced or indented) is ignored. Quoted blocks donât receive any special treatment. Quoted blocks arenât a correct way to format code, and may lead to unexpected results.
We at the Home Assistant forums think that this is the best thing invented since sliced bread. Or maybe Home Assistant. Thank you so so much @lionel-rowe!!!
Two minor request:
I donât want to allow users to skip formatting or disable the dialog in the future. I want them to feel pain until they change their ways. Iâm sadistic like that. Can you make the âDonât show this message againâ and âPost anywayâ buttons optional? For now Iâve hid them with some CSS but would be better to just not include the HTML at all.
Unsure if you are doing language detection or not, but if you are, can you add the estimated language name after the first code fence so that users will properly syntax highlight too?
I wouldnât recommend hiding them, especially if you leave the setting to include HTML detection on. Power users may still want to have their (sanitized) HTML parsed as such, not formatted as code. Two examples where this can be useful are kbd and abbr tags.
If you exclude HTML tags from detection (which may be viable depending on the scope of your forum), hiding the âdonât show this againâ would probably be OK. I still wouldnât recommend hiding the âpost anywayâ, though, because there are bound to still be some edge cases of false positives (I hit one the other day where Iâd omitted a space before an opening parenthesis â poor typesetting, but not unformatted code). Then youâll have a situation where users canât post their question at all, and, unless they report the issue to you directly, you wonât even know about it.
Language detection is beyond the scope of this component, Iâm afraid. Where possible, it looks for syntactical features shared by many languages, such as lines ending in semicolons, certain configurations of curly braces, and so on.
I am thinking about ways to enhance the UX, though. One big improvement would be to make it much more interactive. For example, instead of a simple modal, the user would be presented with a wizard that first asks them which language their post concerns (select from a dropdown), then a screen which asks them to select which ranges of their post are code (defaulting to lines that contain strings flagged by the plugin), then generating the appropriate markdown. This would still include a âskip and post anywayâ option, though, for the reasons I mentioned.
I donât have a timeline for this change, but itâd be good to know if itâs something people would be interested in.
Quick note, we will be official-izing this component soon and working closely with @lionel-rowe and @david to get there. Any ideas or feedback, now is the time to share it!
Then I got a popup saying the post might contain code. I was curious, so I clicked the âFix Codeâ button, but nothing actually happened. Itâs not like the post even has anything resembling code anyway. So something seems a bit off on this.
(In fact, trying to post this topic made the same popup appear.)
Thanks @seanblue, we made a couple of tweaks based on this feedback. Emojis are now ignored:
And we also changed the âFix Codeâ button to say âEdit Postâ. The idea is that you should go back and manually fix your post - it will never be fixed automatically.
It would also be great if there was a hint where the suspected unformatted code is.
I was just writing another reply and got the alert, although I havenât pasted any code. After a while I realized itâs because I used the word topic_id⌠But itâs not obvious that the detector thinks this word is code (and most people wouldnât think that) IMO.
I think that when a word has an underscore in it that doesnât necessarily mean itâs code.
Thanks for all your feedback so far folks! Weâll be adding and tweaking a few settings to reduce the oversensitivity of detection.
@tpetrov one other thing â does the wording of the popup make it clear that you can choose to ignore it and post anyway if you donât think your post contains code? Or does it make it seem like youâre forced to find and âfixâ the perceived problem?
My concern is that a lot of people will not read through itâŚ
You know, when people see a popup with more than one sentence text nowadays, they seem to ignore the text and look for the button Ok (I accept cookies, terms, etc,).
Still, maybe âIt looks like your post may contain unformatted codeâ could be changed to âDo you use code in your post?â, as sometimes questions draw more attention.
Iâm not a UX expert, but this button seems a bit nuclear:
- something I wouldnât like to click. Which of course is the idea - that people will not simply skip it instead of trying to format their post better.
Oooh, I like this idea⌠but I just got a false positive:
It might have been the broken links that tripped it up? Theyâre just taken from the templating engine and look like: [keep things civilized](%{guidelines_url}). Or maybe the HTML img tag?
Weâre rolling out new copy, and building a corpus of positive and negative test sample posts for the component. Bear with us, as this is shaping up nicely!