Line breaks are not being stripped in mefi

April 12, 2012 12:49 PM

Line breaks are not being stripped in mefi. I wanted to know if it's new site policy or a bug, and if it's new site policy, it would be great if we could talk about it. Thank you!
posted by the young rope-rider to Bugs at 12:49 PM (41 comments total)

Can you be more specific? I don't know what you're referring to exactly.

We treat line breaks in text a little differently in posts above the fold than everywhere else on the site—basically, carriage returns are automatically interpolated into actual <br> tags by the server for comments and for [more inside] sections, but not so for the main above-the-fold areas of posts. It's still possible to insert a manual <br> in a post, though we discourage people doing that too often because it makes the front page read a bit weird sometimes.

I don't know of any recent changes to any of this but pb would know for sure if anything's been tweaked.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:53 PM on April 12, 2012 [1 favorite]

Can you give an example of what you mean? I think line breaks in the comment text area have always resulted in a <br> tag.
posted by stopgap at 12:54 PM on April 12, 2012

It's always been like this, just that people don't like it so they rarely do it. We've talked about eliminating the br tag above the fold in posts, but occasionally there is a post (especially when it is about poetry) where it makes sense so we've left it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:56 PM on April 12, 2012

No, nothing has been tweaked with this recently. We allow manual <br> tags in above-the-fold text, otherwise line breaks are stripped.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:56 PM on April 12, 2012

This is my pet peeve and I made a meta already in which the mods kind of shrugged.
posted by desjardins at 1:07 PM on April 12, 2012

Mefi Post Differentiator
posted by crunchland at 1:08 PM on April 12, 2012 [4 favorites]

shrugged is probably not a fair characterization.
posted by desjardins at 1:08 PM on April 12, 2012

I hardly ever use line breaks above the fold, but on the one or two occasions when I have, it's been nice to be able to do so. Thanks for not eliminating it, mods.
posted by zarq at 1:09 PM on April 12, 2012

For example.
posted by zarq at 1:11 PM on April 12, 2012

shrugged is probably not a fair characterization.

How about "the mods were kind of shruggo?"
posted by Rock Steady at 1:12 PM on April 12, 2012 [2 favorites]

Why not simply do every second post in a slightly darker background (the colour of the sidebar, say), or do some outlines, or, like, use some of those fancy animated .gif <HR> substitutes where the little cartoon man walks across the screen and whizzes on it?
posted by Sys Rq at 1:30 PM on April 12, 2012

Yeah, mostly where we are on this is that (a) people don't seem to use it overly much, (b) people seem to conspicuously misuse or abuse it only rarely and we can generally fix that pretty simply, and (c) it can add a little bit of nice variety to posting format now and then when it's used well.

I feel you on the post-differentiation thing and maybe that's something we'd end up tweaking one day (my first instinct there would be to literally just crank an extra 10px between posts or something) but it's not something that has seemed like a pressing issue; folks acclimate pretty quickly and for the folks where it's really a heartbreaker of an issue using greasemonky or some custom stylesheet stuff is a pretty workable DIY solution.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:31 PM on April 12, 2012

Nobody really needs to post multiple paragraphs to the front page. If you have that many links, make each one be a single letter. Then everybody will be happy.
posted by ryanrs at 1:36 PM on April 12, 2012 [4 favorites]

(my first instinct there would be to literally just crank an extra 10px between posts or something)

You could do that, yeah. I just noticed that the posts on the front page are quite a bit closer together than the comments in this thread, which is kind of weird.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:36 PM on April 12, 2012

Yeah, we just made the front page use roughly the same space between posts as we use between comments. We'll try this out for a while and see how it goes.
posted by pb (staff) at 1:49 PM on April 12, 2012 [2 favorites]

Something as subtle as making the distance between paragraphs in a post smaller than the distance between posts would probably fix the problem for good, by the way. And you already do that with comments now.
posted by davejay at 1:54 PM on April 12, 2012

Or uh what cortex said.
posted by davejay at 1:54 PM on April 12, 2012

Warning: the post differentiator posted above looks terrible over the professional white background.
posted by davejay at 1:56 PM on April 12, 2012

If Cortex Shrugged I hope he was metaphysically objective.
posted by adamvasco at 2:03 PM on April 12, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've already had a couple people I was introducing to Metafilter be put off by the lack of clear visual separation between posts

Hell, it took me months before I realized that posts had titles.
posted by asterix at 2:05 PM on April 12, 2012

davejay: "Warning: the post differentiator posted above looks terrible over the professional white background."

Yikes. Yes. Yes it does.
posted by zarq at 2:07 PM on April 12, 2012

Sys Rq: "...some of those fancy animated .gif substitutes where the little cartoon man walks across the screen and whizzes on it?"

We have comment threads for that.
posted by zarq at 2:08 PM on April 12, 2012

Agreed. That's subtle but it looks much cleaner.

And, it's likely than I'm a total idiot, but when you talk of line breaks, are you meaning the hard break with the space after the line? I understand that a whole new paragraph with a space between is a front-page readability issue, but occasionally I've wanted a simple carriage-return to a new line (no space) above the fold, just as a style thing (I mostly post in Music), but it's stripped out.
It never occurred to me to just manually enter the tag and I wouldn't want to ruffle any feathers.
posted by chococat at 2:50 PM on April 12, 2012

You can just enter the tag for when that sort of thing makes tasteful sense, yeah. When we're talking about line breaks we mean single carriage returns; paragraph breaks for practical purposes in this context are just a pair of those, so the blank line between paragraphs is a pair of line breaks.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:12 PM on April 12, 2012

Thanks for not eliminating it, mods.

Thmods.
posted by Meatbomb at 3:15 PM on April 12, 2012

Gotcha, cortex. Thanks.
posted by chococat at 3:16 PM on April 12, 2012

Yeah, we just made the front page use roughly the same space between posts as we use between comments. We'll try this out for a while and see how it goes.

Better, so much better.

When I got to MetaFilter, it was through Lifehacker and their AskMe round-up; it took me months to figure out there that AskMetafilter was a subsite of MetaFilter and it took me months after that to be able to read the front page of MetaFilter. I quite literally had trouble reading what looked like a wall of text. I've adapted, but I have to say that the extra space really helps.
posted by librarylis at 4:15 PM on April 12, 2012

Mefi Post Differentiator

FYI, when you're writing user styles, you can just write the rule once under domain("metafilter.com") and it will apply to *.metafilter.com as well. You don't have to repeat the rule for every subsite.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:47 PM on April 12, 2012

(Oh, now I see that it was probably done that way as each has a different color. But still, you can collapse the parts that invariant into one rule without repeating them.)
posted by Rhomboid at 5:48 PM on April 12, 2012

Is it still okay to say yay? I am happy this worked out well.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:50 PM on April 12, 2012

I hate and fear change.
posted by Justinian at 8:35 PM on April 12, 2012 [1 favorite]

We fear change.
posted by drjimmy11 at 9:12 PM on April 12, 2012

you can collapse the parts that invariant into one rule without repeating them. -- I understand the value of well-crafted code, but aside from elegance, is there any advantage to doing that? Is the way I wrote it mean the script processor functions perceptibly slower, or does doing it the way I did it tax the browser memory in a noticeable way?
posted by crunchland at 9:47 PM on April 12, 2012

The main thing I can think of is that it may future-proof the script against things like additions of subsites. Which is a pretty long-game sort of concern and not a terribly big deal if you're doing maintenance in any case, but it's one consideration.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:27 PM on April 12, 2012

The front page looks much better now. Thanks for making this change.
posted by Mitheral at 7:50 AM on April 13, 2012

The front page looks much better now. Thanks for making this change.

Harrumph. Old codgers like me liked it better the other way. For one thing, you have to do more scrolling because there are fewer posts in a given viewing window.

But also, there is uneven spacing between posts. I don't know from pixels, but right at this instant there are several posts on the front page that start off with blockquotes. There is more space between those posts and the ones above them, than there is between standard single-paragraph posts. That's jarring, to me, and serves no purpose. Is it maybe a bug associated with blockquotes?
posted by beagle at 3:22 PM on April 13, 2012

That's the way blockquotes work. They have padding at the top. Before this change, posts with blockquotes did the same thing. You're probably noticing it now because there's a bit more space between posts, it's a change, and you're thinking about how things are spaced.
posted by pb (staff) at 5:45 PM on April 13, 2012

If you want to go back to the way the front page was before and you're handy with Stylish (Firefox or Chrome), here's the line you need to add:

.post {margin-bottom:0;}
posted by pb (staff) at 5:52 PM on April 13, 2012

I’m rather amazed this became a priority fix when:

• the homepage has exactly four paragraph elements, with everything else marked up nonsemantically
• to this day, line length is essentially the width of your window, an insane assault against the physiology and neurology of reading
• to put it mildly, pb has been resistant and unwelcoming to any suggestion whatsoever that MetaFilter typography needs to be or even can be improved

An ugly, hard-to-read, badly-marked-up site is not a core feature of MetaFilter. You’ll all defend the converse, of course.
posted by joeclark at 11:29 AM on April 15, 2012

joeclark: "to put it mildly, pb has been resistant and unwelcoming to any suggestion whatsoever that MetaFilter typography needs to be or even can be improved"

Not pb.

You want User #1. He's across the desk.

Go to around minute 10 on this video and see mathowie speak about a site redesign from 2007 that never happened.
posted by zarq at 2:47 PM on April 15, 2012

Putting it mildly is telling you that you're repeating yourself pretty obnoxiously, have been for a while, and should either write Matt a letter if you think he's just not heard you the last n times or make an effort to get over it.

Repeatedly grousing in threads that your personal hobbyhorses aren't being addressed is not going to suddenly get them addressed, and the idea that pb is the person whose behavior in this situation sucks is laughable. Managing to frustrate even him to the point where he stops trying to be polite is kind of an accomplishment; you're pretty much the only person in mefi history who has managed it.

But you'll just do this again in a few weeks, so I'm not sure why I'm trying to get through to you. You have basically made yourself into a crank.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:11 PM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]