11

When I flag something "in need of moderator intervention," I can use similar mini-Markdown as comments which appears correctly rendered when I view my flag history.

However, I have received a couple helpful flag feedbacks from moderators where they have also attempted to use similar mini-Markdown available in flags, yet it comes through unparsed when I view my flag history.

Here are two snippets of unparsed Markdown in helpful flag feedbacks I have received1:

I'd rather they just *not*

isn't _quite_ the

While I am able to parse this simple Markdown in my head, I don't think that doing so should be necessary. Beyond this, some Markdown adds functionality like [some link](URL) which unparsed would at best be confusing for the recipient.

Additionally, it appears the asymmetry is confusing for moderators who are attempting to use Markdown where it is unsupported. Since neither the "in need of moderator intervention" flag textbox nor the flag feedback textbox supports a Markdown preview (in the same way that comments and chat do not), there is no immediate indicator that the flag feedback field would not behave the same way the others do.

1The feedback has been reduced to just the issue so as to not give information about the nature of the flags. There also may be more instances, but I have almost 70 pages of helpful post flags and there's no way to filter just flags with feedback (but that's a different issue).

Improve this question
3
  • Considering the limited amount of characters available in the flags, I'm not sure supporting this and thus encouraging using it would be a good idea. Combined with raising the character limit you could be onto something.
    – Mast
    Jul 7, 2022 at 17:02
  • 3
    That was the similar initial argument here. And I agree that a higher character limit would be helpful and one which has been requested both on the feedback and the flag side. My point is, however, that it doesn't make sense for it to be supported one direction and not the other. People who are familiar with SE are already aware that sometimes we have to use some SE arcana to fix things within the character restrictions. However when flag feedback is 50 characters there's plenty of room for markdown (and it's being used by moderators).
    – Henry Ecker
    Jul 7, 2022 at 17:08
  • 4
    The examples don't, necessarily, indicate we're trying to use Markdown. Those are typical indicators of emphasis in ASCII text, which predate Markdown by at least decades (i.e. Markdown uses those, because people were already using them). The examples being poor doesn't mean mods don't try to use Markdown, or that we don't use Markdown knowing the system won't parse it, but that the user should understand (e.g. sometimes Markdown is a fairly compact format & users have the tools to figure it out) The overriding issue is the very small number of characters available in flag replies.
    – Makyen
    Jul 7, 2022 at 18:35

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .