Pros and cons of formatted paste on forums

@viet @oldbonsai Several months ago, the ability to paste formatted text was added to the forums. I personally have found this to make the experience worse, but apparently there is a way to turn it off site wide. In particular, I often incidentally copy linked text, header text, etc. and when I try to paste it, it adds all this formatting I don’t want. I wanted to run through a few examples and put up a poll to see what others think.


Take the WaniKani Wikipedia page for example.

If you go there and copy the header, you get this:

WaniKani

instead of this:
WaniKani

Similarly if you copy the first word (“WaniKani”) of the paragraph (which is bold), you get this:
WaniKani

instead of this:
WaniKani

Let’s say you copy the second sentence, which contains links. You get this:
It uses radicals, mnemonics, and a spaced repetition learning system in order to help its users memorize the characters and vocabulary more effectively.[2]

instead of this:
It uses radicals, mnemonics, and a spaced repetition learning system in order to help its users memorize the characters and vocabulary more effectively.[2]


Now let’s take a case within the forums. If you copy text from a post, you will also copy the formatting. For example, I can copy the bold text from this post’s preview itself, and get this:
WaniKani

instead of this:
WaniKani

However, here’s one particularly unfortunate case. Let’s say I want to demonstrate to someone how to use ruby tags to add furigana. I would put some block text for them to copy:

<ruby>漢<rt>かん</rt></ruby><ruby>字<rt>じ</rt></ruby>

However, pasting formatted text means you get this (because it escapes the HTML tags):
<ruby>漢<rt>かん</rt></ruby><ruby>字<rt>じ</rt></ruby>

instead of this:
かん


Now, you can get around all this issues by pasting as plain text instead of doing a regular paste. But I think most people don’t know about this, and most people probably just use ctrl+v instead of ctrl+shift+v.

So with all that in mind, the question is: does formatted paste do more good or harm? Let’s have a poll to find out.

  • We should keep formatted paste because I like it.
  • We should turn off formatted paste, because I dislike it.
  • We should keep formatted paste because there’s a workaround (paste as plain text)
  • I don’t care one way or the other
  • Other (please explain)

0 voters

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Speaking as a web developer, nothing introduces more bugs than trying to override default behaviour.

I’ve been forced to do it in the past, and now that code has gotten so cumbersome it’s unmaintainable.

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What are you considering default behavior? Pasting formatted text? Discourse only added this functionality earlier this year, so I don’t think it would be overriding default behavior so much as restoring simpler behavior.

Default bahaviour, from my perspective, is any behavior that cannot be altered by changing configuration settings. If there is some Discourse setting where you set something like formattedText: false then by all means, use it. But, if there isn’t, and you have to make those changes yourself, you’re very likely to miss something, and introduce problems elsewhere.

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I was going to suggest using your system’s or browser’s shortcut keys for pasting plain text, but it seems Jeff Atwood already recommended it. The existence of pasting plain text mapped to a different set of keys does say something about the responsibility of regular paste (being it pastes stylized text as a default). Whether it has any business on a message board is debatable.

I’ll bring it up with the other staff and see what their thoughts are on this.

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@bladepoint There is a Discourse setting for it. I linked to the post on the Discourse forums where the co-founder mentioned it as an option.

@viet Yeah, I think it’s definitely debatable whether it makes sense on a forum like this. But that’s also why I created the poll. If most people like it or don’t care, it’s probably best to keep it (for all I know, I could be the only one that hates it :sweat_smile:)

A little off topic, but thank you @seanblue for sharing how to make furigana! I had no idea until now.

With regard to your topic, I would say that my opinion probably doesn’t matter as much as that I haven’t had an issue with the formatting of pasted text, but for those of us who haven’t taken the time to learn how to create this kind of formatting in our own posts, having the formatted paste is preferable. I’m not sure about other operating systems, but with Windows one can select “paste as plain text” as right-click menu option.

One way I am seeing this is the following:

If we leave it enabled, then there is the option of stylized and plain text (via system/browser shortcuts) pasting.

If we disable it, then that leaves only one option: plain text pasting option. Users who prefer stylized text have no option.

That’s partially true at least. You can still get the stylized text within the forum by quoting a whole post. But that can be inconvenient and it doesn’t help when pasting text from outside of the forums.

But yes, I agree with your point otherwise. Because of that option I debated even creating this post. But I wanted to at least make sure you were aware of the option and to gauge the opinions of others in the community.

No problem. It’s been coming up a lot lately. Hopefully within a few months everyone will know about it! :slight_smile:

3 Likes

I wonder if discourse gives an option to turn this feature on at a user level.

I doubt it, or they probably would have mentioned it.

i hated formatted paste because i thought ctrl+shift+v didn’t work on discourse for some strange reason. turns out there’s something wrong with my firefox and this shortcut doesn’t work at all for me.

my workaround was pasting into notepad and copying from there <.<’

help?

usually i wouldn’t bother to ask here but internet search was completely unsuccessful to my surprise.

ctrl+v works but ctrl+shift+v doesn’t. absolutely nowhere. not on any webpage, not in the search bar or the address bar or in about:config or FF settings. doesn’t work in safe mode. doesn’t work after deleting cache, cookies, history and everything. doesn’t work with a new FF profile.

it works in other browsers, software and windows itself.

what the hell?

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Control Shift V doesn’t work for me either. I run Firefox with noscript and other high security settings. I have had trouble with most of the browser extensions as well, so I have just given up on them.

Right click and select paste as plain text? Assuming that’s an option in Firefox.

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it’s not unfortunately (well, at least for me).

@RoseWagsBlue
same for me but i even without addons it doesn’t work. plus, addons shouldn’t affect the search bar i think.

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That is not an option on Firefox.
However, I just added a Firefox addon, CopyAsPlainText, which does work.

Copy As Plain Text by ilGur

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1071649

Probably not helpful…
(I’m referring to the part about Adblock, not that there’s a solution.)

been there already but thanks ^^

@RoseWagsBlue
lol, just added a similar addon as well and set ctrl+alt+c for copying plain text but it’s not entirely satisfying to have a workaround, when i’m otherwise quite used to ctrl+shift+v (or ctrl+alt+v in windows software).
edit: nope, fail. that shortcut didn’t work. using the mouse for that is not an option. the search continues …

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