Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-1915726-20130311070356/@comment-1694864-20130312044346

Inpursuit wrote: Archonell wrote: Perhaps extending the problem to having users 'learn' HTML was too far, but surely it's also sometimes too complicated and perhaps discouraging to rich-text-users? I have problems using Source Mode because I simply can't make sense of Wiki code, and am more fond of using Rich Mode, so as my personal opinion, I'd be deterred from making edits because of a lack of understanding of how Wiki-code works and in caution of making a mistake and screwing up the code.

Actually the Visual Mode causes the user less likely to notice the problem they have caused. Chance is the display still looks OK but mistake like adding internal link with external link style (e.g. Draven instead of Draven, misleading our task bot and search result of "") is not visible to the visual mode user. With source mode such anti-manual of style editing is instantly noticeable. If you made mistake in source mode, the problem is also more apparent to other users, so the possibility for the issue gets fixed is higher than edits made by visual mode.

From a programmer's perspective: External links aren't as bad for mainspace articles (see my recent run to fix internal links format), but it's robot-hell when it comes to comments. I can't even use the API (or find the appropriate one) to fix HTML leakage in comments because Wikia has pretty much "protected" comments server-side. That is, any subpage of a talk page that starts with  automatically redirects to a   to the comment. &mdash;BryghtShadow 04:43, March 12, 2013 (UTC)