Steph asked 5 years ago
Hello Rui & Sara,
I hope you’re all right.
I have a question about the formatting of the comments on the RandomNerdTutorials website:
What dialect can we use to apply correct formatting in the editor? Especially when you want to provide a piece of code… the HTML <pre> tag doesn’t seem to be recognized as such: indentation is not respected at all for example (whereas the inline <code> tag seems to be).
Can we possibly use Markdown to format things better?
Unfortunately, this formatting flaw is very annoying to explain things clearly. If the site is under WordPress, there are probably plugins that allow this (?)
Also, it seems impossible to re-edit a posted comment to possibly correct it. That’s a shame too.
Rui Santos Staff answered 5 years ago
Hello Stéphane, we’ve previously used the Disqus.com plugin to handle comments. They offered all the features, but we had so many issues that we’ve reverted to the basic WordPress comments section.
Recently, we’ve been having problems and hacker attempts to take over the website (file injection, bad requests, etc). We blocked most formatting in the comments to avoid any security flaw.
Since, the RTN blog doesn’t allow to create account, it’s impossible to edit the questions – otherwise you would be able to edit all the comments. WordPress is definitely great, but in my opinion and experience it lacks many features for bigger sites.
I used to have more plugins and the site would get extremely slow with plugins, user registrations, etc… That’s why I had to disable everything.
I’ll have to re-think that and see if there’s a good and secure method to allow code. The best way is to write code is to link back to GitHub Gist or Pastebin.com. If someone posts a full code in the comments section, it might not be accepted because the post would get too long.
Thanks for your interest and all the help in the Forum! I really appreciate it.
Regards,
Rui
Steph answered 5 years ago
Hello Rui and thank you for your answer.
Ok, I fully understand all the difficulties you encountered and that made you give up. WordPress is a good content management platform for classic websites, as long as you make sure you update it regularly, and limit yourself to installing plugins that have been officially validated (as well as making sure they’re up to date).
The native features of WordPress may therefore be suitable and sufficient for your tutorial writing needs on RNT. Nevertheless, as far as managing community discussions around an article is concerned, and in the specific case of RNT, the exchanges are often likely to be quite technical and may require an adapted formatting to make them easier to read. Markdown –> HTML converters generally allow to solve this difficulty quite simply. JetPack, for example, which offers a range of functionalities (especially for security) allows this. But there are others. You can take a look at the following article for more information:
An In-Depth Look at the 10 Best WordPress Comment Plugins (March 2, 2020)
It can also be considered that the exchanges around an RNT article can be relocated to a platform more appropriate for this type of communication such as a forum, offering at the same time a more advanced set of functionalities to manage these discussions. The Discourse platform, for example, has been very successful in this respect and has been adopted by many communities. It also supports Markdown format editing to enrich content.
These are just a few ideas, but I fully understand that you are mobilized on other things. Writing tutorials and learning guides is already a lot of work, and that’s what’s important for us (readers).
Thank you in any case for all this content that you regularly offer us, and which contributes greatly to the improvement of our knowledge.
Regards,
Steph