That makes sense for Meta, but do you see the potential value for Discourse users who do want to maintain longer wiki content?
I’m curious about the resistance to this idea. I love reading really long posts on Discourse with multiple headings, it feels very nice. Is there a specific argument for why editing really long posts with multiple headings shouldn’t also feel very nice?
If Discourse supports writing an enormous post in the first place, why wouldn’t we also want it to support a more convenient way to edit such a post?
Technically you can do anything with any software. You can write a novel on Twitter if you are willing to squeeze it out in an interminable series of 280 character replies-to-replies. That doesn’t, however, mean writing a novel is in any way the goal of Twitter or even a good idea.
Discourse has light wiki aspects, yes, but trying to turn it into a full blown Wikipedia substitute isn’t the goal.
That’s reasonable, but it’s also blowing the request here a bit out of proportion.
Let’s ignore the wiki aspect of this for a second though: at the core this feature request isn’t about wiki-functionality at all, it’s about post-editing.
Let’s say I write an announcement post in my forum about a release I do, and it’s just a long post by its nature. It’s not a wiki post at all, just a really really big post, with multiple headings.
The idea described here would make that much easier to work with, and Discourse supports the creation of that kind of post in the first place. Why is it a bad idea for Discourse to not support easier editing of such a post?
Nope, I‘m not asking for rocket science. I‘m looking for a composer function (?) to collapse and expand (= hide) content I‘m not willing to edit. I‘d like to stay focused on some specific section - and - if possible:
Thank you @codinghorror for the clarity on direction.
@terraboss fwiw I think “wiki” in the topic here is causing some undue bias against your feature request. After reading here and thinking about this, I’ve realized that:
This request doesn’t have anything to do with wiki functionality. It’s a request for post-editing that could apply to to any post with multiple headings.
Post-length isn’t the primary factor that drives this need. A post with multiple sections, regardless of length, would benefit from section-specific editing.
The #release-notes topics here on Meta have some good examples where one might imagine the ux improvement to be gained. I hope the Discourse team might consider that such an improvement would be warranted (and yes, even a good idea) for a non-trivial amount of us who write and edit similar posts on a more frequent basis.
Yes, but individual posts are often still split further. This one, for example, is 1 of 2 posts but itself has 5 different sections.
I make no assumptions on whether or not the Discourse team would actually welcome such a feature, I only hope that they might consider why others would.
I can’t see how these requests would fit with Discourse’s core design/structure.
The post is the basic unit and the requests here propose changes to the core code that would effectively extend post features to multi-section posts or multi-post posts.
Multi-post posts should be rejected because it fundamentally alters the most basic structure of Discourse. While a plug-in could be developed it would add a new relationship that overlays the core structure and is, AFAIK, outside a key assumption assumption of every other plug-in.
Multi-section posts are a far more coherent addition to Discourse which is probably why they have already been mooted in relation to the TOC plug-in which, incidentally, only uses the first post in a topic. IMO multi-section posts would be a good plug-in for the few sites that really need it.
Precisely. This isn’t a limitation of Discourse, as much as a tug of war between what wiki posts are, and how the wiki-lite implementation within Discourse doesn’t align to very specific use-cases.
I’m grateful for the implementation of Wiki which exists in Discourse, there’s enough there for organisations who don’t need a full MediaWiki installation. If it were to get much more involved, then it wouldn’t be as accessible as it is right now.
Thanks @Remah, that’s a great explanation of why this is not a good fit with existing technical design.
@Stephen, upon reflection the wiki connection seems to be mostly noise. The tug of war I see is between whether or not editing a piece of a post, wiki-post or otherwise, is worth the effort.
I can appreciate the argument that given how posts work under the hood, that it isn’t. It’s still a limitation, but perhaps one that is prohibitively expensive to overcome.
Conceptually a lot of this request is simply on hold until we have a clean way to go from cooked markdown to raw. We don’t have a clean mechanism for this due to certain limitations of markdown.it
We will certainly not “hack something up” here to allow you to edit a section, but if we have a good reverse map this feature could be a trivial change. (as would be markdown syntax highlighting in the editor and a bunch of other interesting features)
Worth noting that Boochani wrote his novel from an Australian detention center using WhatsApp. It took almost five years and later won a significant literary prize.
You could use a Swiss army knife for fruit segmentation or just do what ever you want until the requirements will fit. Some people are using 3D printers for weapon manufacturing .
There is a 32000 character limit to a post which I have hit. On StackOverflow I hit it several times and then the SO moderators descended upon me like a wetwork squad.
EDIT
Just learned that there is a setting for the limit
segmentation or just do what ever you want until the requirements will fit. Some people are using 3D printers for weapon manufacturing . 