Announcement & FAQ’s and stuff re: Forum Updates

nova

As of [DATE] the MyFitnessPal community forums will be making a change to incorporate Vanilla Forums Rich Editor for formatting discussions and comments, replacing BBCode. This change is being made to bring us up to date with current Vanilla forums features, support future updates, and provide a modern, user-friendly forum experience.

Why is this change necessary?

BBCode was invented in 1998 and was a landmark improvement at the time. While we recognize that change can be frustrating, we believe that Rich Editor is a simpler and user-friendly interface that—like BBCode over two decades ago—represents a modern standard in UX that we would like to embrace and utilize.

Rich Editor has been a supported feature of Vanilla forums since at least 2021, and when we launched our first redesign of the forums in November of that year, we launched with that feature enabled. Due to an abundance of support of BBCode, at that time we opted to reverse this update temporarily. In the 4 years since, Vanilla has iterated and updated this feature, providing a number of functionalities that will deliver tangible benefits to our community.

What features are new?

The following new features will be added via Rich Editor;

• Text headers * (replaces super/subscript)
• Insert media - the ability to directly embed YouTube/Vimeo videos
• Images in-list
• Image management options
• Table support (if pasted from another source) 
• Smart embedding (just post the link, and it will embed!)
  

What features will continue?

Nearly all of the features you currently use

• Bold, italics, strikethrough, etc
• Links & hyperlinks
• Direct images & attachments
• Quotes, code blocks, & spoiler
• Bulleted & numbered lists
• Mentions

What features are no longer available?

The following features will be lost during the transition:

• Ability to change font color
• Underline
• Existing legacy emojis will be replaced with standard emojis
• Super/sub-script & font size changing *
• Text alignment 
  

Will this update break the format of older posts?

We have no reason to believe this will break older, existing posts

This is what Rich Editors is/does. Here is a link to Vanilla’s documentation about Rich Editor.

Rae's Screenshots with the original Vanilla text, which needs editing:

• Text formatting/links

Selecting text in the editor displays the following formatting options: bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code, and hyperlink.

In addition, you can use the following keyboard shortcuts:

• ctrl+b or ⌘+b for bold.
• ctrl+i or ⌘+i for italic.
• ctrl+k or ⌘+k to display the link menu, where you can enter a URL and text to display.

✔️ TIP: You can also quickly create a link by copying a URL (e.g., from your browser), selecting text in the editor, and pressing ctrl+v or ⌘+V to replace the highlighted text with the link.

• Paragraph formatting

Click into a paragraph to display a paragraph-level formatting menu to the left, as shown below.

The options in each category are as follows: 

Special formatting examples

While spoiler text is always visible when editing the post, it will automatically be collapsed when the post is published, until a user clicks to view it. This ensures that each user can decide whether or not to view the content.

• Lists

Here are a few tips when working with lists:

• Type "-" and press space to begin a bulleted list.
• Press enter/return to drop down to the next bullet.
• Press enter/return twice to end the list and resume standard paragraph text.

1. Type "1." and press space to begin a numbered list.
2. Press enter/return to drop down to the next number.
3. Press enter/return twice to end the list and resume standard paragraph text.

Indent & outdent lists

Indenting/outdenting is possible in two ways:

• Via the list menu shown below:

• Via the following keyboard shortcuts:
  • Press tab to indent
  • Press enter/return to outdent

📝 NOTE: To outdent via the enter/return key, the paragraph must be blank.

List indentation example

Images in lists

You can include images in bulleted and numbered lists.

For numbered lists, specifically, Rich Editor allows you to insert images and continue the numbering flow. Let's look at an example:

• Links & embeds

The Link menu, which displays when pasting a URL into the editor or selecting one, allows you to display your links in three formats:

• URL
• Rich Link
• Card

URL example

Rich Link example

📝 NOTE: If the pasted link supports Smart Embedding, the Card view will be used by default. If Smart Embedding is not supported, a Rich Link to the page is used by default.

• Tables

While Rich Editor does not currently support the creation of tables natively, you can copy and paste tables into the editor from another source, such as Word or Excel.

Table overview

Once pasted, you can then edit the table content. Keep the following in mind:

• The format of your tables is controlled by your Theme. With variables, you can control formatting like alternating row colors and whether column lines display.
• Currently, when pasting a table containing images, those images will not be included. You must manually insert images into the table after it's pasted.

Unlike images, you cannot click to select a table and delete it via a button. To delete a table, you must select the entire table and click delete or backspace, as shown below:

Format your tables

Check out the article below to learn how to use theme variables in your Style Guide to change the look of your tables.