Comment Formatting

The joys of using simple HTML to highlight.

HTML is a ‘markup’ language, so you can put markups in amongst your text. These look like <command>text</command>. The command can be many things, but the comment editor restricts you on what it will allow. The really simple ones are:-

  1. bold; write <b>my text</b>
  2. italic; write <i>my text</i>
  3. strikeout. write <s>my text</s>
  4. underline. write <u>my text</u>

How to I put quotes in my messages?

You can just put quotes around whatever you want using the keyboard. But there is a more effective way for longer quotes, block quotes.

This is a multiline blockquote. Now what kind of waffle did the person you are quoting actually write

This is the same trick as for simple HTML.
<blockquote>someone elses text</blockquote>

But don’t put really big quotes in your comments. They’re meant for grabbing a point from someone else’s comment or from an external source to illustrate your point. If you dump big comments in, then you can expect a chorus of complaint in comments from other people. The moderators tend to take a dim view of it at well. You will find that the point of your comment gets drowned by the point that you should use links!

How do I put links in the comments cleanly

There is a good reason to use links. There is absolutely no point in pasting large amounts of text in comments here. If they’re elsewhere, then just use the web to link to them. The moderators tend to view dropping large amounts of copy-paste text as a major indicator of a troll. If we see suspicious looking text, then frequently we will do a google-search to see if it has been copied from elsewhere. If it is, then you’ll get a summary deletion and a nasty note.

So use links. Preferably use human readable links. People want to look know what you have under it, they don’t want to know the machine level details like where to find it on the net. So the human readable text should be readable by humans. It is pretty trivial.

To put a link in a comment, just do something like this

<a href=”http://my-bloody-long-link”>Visible text</a>

This would show as a link called ‘Visible text’ highlighted as a link. Clicking on it will go to what you would like them to seem (if they choose to do so).

For instance if you wanted to put in a link to elections.org.nz

<a href=”http://www.elections.org.nz/”>Elections</a>

This would show as Elections which is easier for humans to read. It also avoids getting looked at by the spam trap as being another horrible spambot trying to junk up the site.

Those smiley faces and how to use them

Have a look at all of the nice 🙂 and not so nice 😈 in this link

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