CKEditor 4 is reaching the end of life (source). Instead of jumping onto the CKEditor 5 bandwagon, I propose Invision consider an alternative editor. There are many well-established modern editors such as, for example, TinyMCE, Froala, Quill, and Redactor, to name a few. Any of these would make satisfactory alternatives.
CKEditor may be 'old school,' but it has become bloated, larger in file size and load time. Most of the issues it encounters often have to do with responsive layouts on a mobile device and excessive load time. As mobile continues to dominate the landscape, I feel it may be prudent to focus on an editor development that has kept up successfully with the times with the least issues.
Changing the editor should not be expected in the next release. But a roadmap should be considered for a future transition. Thank you for your time and consideration. 😀
Where Markdown starts to flail is for the somewhat edge-case where you're doing something in a reply that really is more detailed than simple markup. This is where it gets complicated.
Most replies in forums will have bold, italics, links, things that are fairly easy to parse - but it's when you have something that doesn't map *exactly* to the markup (or Markdown) that you have to reverse engineer it in some fashion.
Now, of course, IPS already does this when you're playing around with quoting, embedding metadata into the markup to indicate author/source of post/whatever, all the things you'd want to have in order to take that quote and springboard events off it like alerts.
There are a few things you can do about this. You can either 1) simplify the markup to simply be a mention to the author, a simple link to the post and rely on the mention to handle the notification, or 2) reinvent the kind of markup you're embedding to keep the metadata intact.
The former is what NodeBB does if memory serves, the latter is what Discourse did at least initially; at least one early adopter of Discourse referred to their markup as DiscoMarkBBcodeDown or some similar mashup because it tried to handle Markdown as its primary lingua franca, HTML for the things that Markdown couldn't do, and bbcode for meta markup that didn't align to HTML.
It also amuses me that WordPress eventually reinvented bbcode for such cases (this is, after all, what shortcode is) precisely for the cases where their editor couldn't handle it.
But then you get into the question of: how much do you *really* want to support in replies? I would make the argument that complex and rich editing for topic starters (plus cases like Pages) is very desirable, and that yes, Markdown or something like it is probably all you *actually* need for replies. But that's a value proposition that has to be weighed up against the communities that *don't* do that.
I could over in my little weird niche, find you any number of forums that have the most ridiculous and intricate snippets of raw HTML embedded into each post to make decorative frames around the content, sufficiently complex that they require to be posted as templates for users to copy/paste because you'd never use them normally, far beyond what even the usual types of bbcode support. Some of these templates are so ornate they even include user-driven animation (e.g. a decorative picture, hover over to see the content). Whether this is user friendly or not is, largely, irrelevant to outside observers; those are their customers, that is what they do, and most other forum software increasingly is just not going to support it.
But that's where we get to the value proposition: those users aren't going to be moving to IPS any time soon, and those that are... they'll accept the reduction in functionality even to align to IPS 4.5/4.6 (because there will be some for them without major dev work, I think), and probably even to Markdown - meaning that you wouldn't really lose any users this way because they weren't going to be your users anyhow. For the IPS core market on the other hand, I think it's very reasonable to suggest that, actually, Markdown represents a sufficiently robust set of core formatting that users would want.
I still wouldn't ask _us_ however because we're not the userbase at large. We are the customers, the people who pay for some flavour of the software - but we're not the vast hordes of people who _use_ it, a critical distinction a lot of forum admin places (hi TAZ) seem to forget.
Additionally, anecdotally the thoughts I've had from people who want a mobile app tend to align along 'I want notifications and a simplified editing experience' because they're likely not editing the full rich content on mobile, but replying where the Markdown-esque editing experience is sufficient.
One thing we do want to do is do something extra for Pages. The functions you need for most topics/replies is vastly different to what you will need for pages construction.
Can we get an option for each sub-forum to show more than 25 topics per page. I have a couple of sub-forums where I'd like to increase it to say 50 per page while keeping it normal on the rest.
EYM reacted to Linux-Is-Best in CKEditor 4 end of life - alternative editor consideration
