Editor for posts

I guess I don't really think the yui editor sucks, but I would definitely appreciate something like the facebook editor (especially with all the help it gives you trying to share things) more.  If Andrew's got one working, my vote would be to give it the ol' testies on our major browsers and put it in.

As an aside, I kinda feel like there's a mismatch between the tickets that are in trac and the things we actually want changed.  For example, I didn't know anyone thought the yui editor sucked, other than in that sense that everything on the web sucks.

I think the need for a basic rich (button) editor is needed on new threads.  I'm really going with the blogging concept here, and whether it's our own or somebody else's, it's very common across the web (from blogging platforms, to email clients) that it's completely familiar for people to get started.

So new threads, would default to a rich text editor (with buttons), but replies would be inline with a plain box (like we spoke of), and a 2nd version of this would be an intelligent inline editor that is aware of images/videos, etc.  But for now I think it's important to have an inline plain text for replies (just like intense debate).  Version 2 of the inline editor can allow for rich text editing.

And facebook recognizes urls/pics, but doesn't handle bold/bullets/emoticons/ etc.  These are the types of items on blogs/email/im, etc. that ppl are used to and should be right in front of you when creating a new thread.

I understand people are used to it and thats a good point... however the 2 editors used so far just have been absolute ass.  Weird shit always happens when you press 'enter' and they always get resized weird and stuff.  So the real question is what stuff in the WSIWYG editor is crucial?  Ithink once we have that nailed down then we can figure out what thefinal solution should look like.  Here is a thread I started to get to the bottom of this.

http://labs.lefora.com/2007/09/13/what-features-are-critical-editor-wysiwyg-or-other/

I really don't agree. If we're encouraging discussion than the WYSIWYG doesn't bring anything to the table. I can see the need for a little more when it coems to the thread post but I still don't think we need a full featured editor. It's more of a pain than it's worth. Blog is the only place I see people using font styles and such.. in IM and email and forums pretty much never. I know we're going for more than just tranditional forums but the editor should be simple to encourage communication.

Perhaps if I saw one good WYSIWYG that actually did what it was supposed to I might feel different, but up till now I have been really disappointed with all of them.

But to be fair, you can't blame a lot of that stuff on the editor (spacing/resizing (well, maybe spacing, but we could probably fix it)).  I can almost gaurantee we will have just as many problems with a homebrew one or any other 3rd party one out there.  IMHO the best thing we can do is pick a platform we're relatively happy with (TinyMCE is right out) and leave it in and evolve it.  You can't possibly enumerate all the things that could go wrong with one of these components until you use it seriously. 

Also, I've only had exactly one ticket prioritized for evolving this editor and it was pretty vague.  I really think the tickets should match our pissed-offedness, if at all possible.  Cause otherwise, there's plenty of crap in there to keep me busy.

I think I have a lower bar for "absolute ass," because for me there's this huge middle ground of "grey area ass" where I feel the alternatives are just about as assy.

Also interesting to see the sig used... first time I saw it... not bad at all.

Yea... my statement on absolute ass is a bit harsh... I tend to be black and white on things quite often.