[Steam Community] Use Markdown instead of BBCode

[Aemony]

BBCode is friggin horrible to write in. Steam's Communities really need to support Markdown, which is the modern way of formatting stuff online, used by Reddit, Discord and other services and applications.

So my suggestion would be to investigate if Markdown can be implemented alongside BBCode, or if BBCode can be easily converted to Markdown, and then run with Markdown and shut BBCode down already.

[Vas]

#1. It can start at the beginning of a line when someone puts it there to start a list.
#2. Kinda like that.

Lets	Find
Shall	We?

[cinedine]

Aemony původně napsal:

How often does tables come up in Steam's discussions? Oh, almost never? Does Steam's BBCode even support tables?

How often does any formatting come up in discussions? The most common ones are links and they are as easy as to paste the url. And how often do you want to see extensive formatting in one's post? You can already use plain text formatting as shown above.

The usefulness comes in when talking about UGC like guides.

[Tito Shivan]

cinedine původně napsal:

"Obviously" is rather subjective. If you are used to HTML tags, BBCode is superior in terms of clarity. It also has the undeniable advantage of not accidentally format something.

¯_(ツ)_/¯
Typical Reddit accidental formatting. There's not a single week I don't see it happening.

Personally, I prefer BBCODE over markdown. Simply for the fact it's semantically detached from the text instead of being mish-mashed into it. You can tell apart content from format at a glance. I can tell when 'spoiler' is a word and when is a tag.

[Vas]

Tito Shivan původně napsal:

Typical Reddit accidental formatting. There's not a single week I don't see it happening.

Personally, I prefer BBCODE over markdown. Simply for the fact it's semantically detached from the text instead of being mish-mashed into it. You can tell apart content from format at a glance. I can tell when 'spoiler' is a word and when is a tag.

Thank you, I love this guy, someone promote him further than just orange text moderator! Gold text with platinum double star!

[Aemony]

Tito Shivan původně napsal:

cinedine původně napsal:

"Obviously" is rather subjective. If you are used to HTML tags, BBCode is superior in terms of clarity. It also has the undeniable advantage of not accidentally format something.

¯_(ツ)_/¯
Typical Reddit accidental formatting. There's not a single week I don't see it happening.

To be fair at this point ¯_(ツ)_/¯ have become its own inside joke on Reddit. It's a bit sad to see that we as a society transitions more and more over to "🤷" instead of "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" (need an updated Win10 to see the emoji).

[Tankor Smash]

I'd like to add another vote for markdown for posts, especially for quoting in replies.

[quote=Username;1231231231232131]
their comment[/quote]

vs

>their comment

I can't imagine it would be an easy change to make, but man does it ever help along formatting in comments. You lose who said what, which might be important, but I'm not sure it's bringing all that much anymore.

[Washell]

Is Steam actually BBCode? I was under the impression they lifted the syntax because the old forums were BBCode but built their own underlying system.

[Tankor Smash]

I'm not sure what it exactly it, but it seemed like it enough haha. I would really love to see a change here, but it can't be easy.

[Aemony]

Washell původně napsal:

Is Steam actually BBCode? I was under the impression they lifted the syntax because the old forums were BBCode but built their own underlying system.

For all intents and purposes, yes. What defines markup languages typically is not what underlying system or code is used to translate the markup language to the proper code, but the markup language itself. The markup language, synatx, tags, and such on these discussion boards are of the same style as BBCode, with some minor tweaks and new tags implemented to match the needs of Valve.

[Washell]

Aemony původně napsal:

Washell původně napsal:

Is Steam actually BBCode? I was under the impression they lifted the syntax because the old forums were BBCode but built their own underlying system.

For all intents and purposes, yes. What defines markup languages typically is not what underlying system or code is used to translate the markup language to the proper code, but the markup language itself. The markup language, synatx, tags, and such on these discussion boards are of the same style as BBCode, with some minor tweaks and new tags implemented to match the needs of Valve.

Ah right. Thanks for the explanation. Kinda had it my head that BBCode was the whole package. But in that case they could probably write a parser that can handle both BBCode and markdown at the same time, if they so desired.

[sEver]

How about *support both* and let us _choose_ which processor do we want to apply to the text we input? Use bbcode by default to not shake the current users, but allow us to change it on a per-post basis or in the profile preferences "I only write in markdown".

The great advantage of Markdown is that it looks quite readable when not processed.

I'm working with a modding tool that takes a mod description but doesn't process bbcode obviously, so when you look at the mod in Steam, you see nice bbcode based formatting, but when you look at the mod in the modtool, you see raw code. With markdown, It would look ok in both places.

[マスキュリン]

I remember having to use markdown because of reddit, after I had a perfectly (long) plain text going completely out of format because it doesn't detect linebreaks naturally inside the textbox, which makes no sense. Why on earth do you need to put two spaces at each linebreak at all?

Also, as someone who roleplays a lot, "emotes/actions" are put into asterisks. Markdown isn't fond of it either.

[Tankor Smash]

Masqurin původně napsal:

Also, as someone who roleplays a lot, "emotes/actions" are put into asterisks. Markdown isn't fond of it either.

The reason they use astericks for emoting is because they used to be used for italics way back, isn't it? It's not that it was used for the astericks specifically.

Stuff like /me walks into the room, would come out 'Player1 walks into the room' in italics anyway.

[zaphodikus]

bbcode has done it's time. Lets move onto something more expressive, it is looking tired.

[Zefar]

zaphodikus původně napsal:

bbcode has done it's time. Lets move onto something more expressive, it is looking tired.

It most certainly has not also bbcode is lovely to use. So easy to format.