570425 - Line breaks are not honoured

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: Forum, task, P4)

Description

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

1. Go to https://support-stage-new.mozilla.com/en-US/forums/test-b/722
2. Reply with 2 rows of text. e.g.
line 1
line 2

It gets posted as 1 line of text

Comment 1

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

http://screencast.com/t/NDk0MjE5

Comment 2

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

This is part of Mediawiki markup. Single line breaks are ignore, double line breaks are not.

Comment 3

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Having to use html in a forum post is quite ugly. Is there a way to allow this in the forums/questions app? Possibly with the new parser?

Comment 4

[David Tenser [:djst]]

I'm not really sure what the use case is though -- when do you need to put a new line of text right under the previous one, and why can't you then just use a new paragraph instead?

Comment 6

[Andrew Truong [:feer56] [:andrewtruong] [:atruong]]

Re-opening via duplicate bug I filed. 

Use case:
User is told to to us last 5 crash ids. 
User pastes the crash ids on new lines and expects them to be separated by default, unfortunately,the user must hit enter twice for a new line or use <br> (line breaks) to make it work. 

Comment 0 from Bug 935266:
We should make is default across all forums that when we hit enter for a new line, a line break is made and that we don't have to write a "<br>" every time we need to make a new line. This also confuses users as many users hit enter and expect a new line but instead this doesn't happen. This should be done for the support forum, the discussion forums, article discussions and with private messages as well. 

SUMO Contributor forum thread about this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/709735?last=55083

Comment 7

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Yeah, pasting crash IDs is a good point, Andrew. Do you have other cases for this? I'm asking since this would probably be a large change, and even investigating the scope would take time, so we should have a good reason to put in that time.

Comment 8

[Andrew Truong [:feer56] [:andrewtruong] [:atruong]]

Another use case would be for new contributors trying not knowing about line breaks. 

Another use case is when a user is responding and is on a new line when posting their reply but instead, it doesn't appear as the split up like how they wanted it to be. This make it jumbled for contributors to read and could possibly make the user aggravated.

Comment 9

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Maybe an alternative would be to show a live preview of the post?

Comment 10

[Andrew Truong [:feer56] [:andrewtruong] [:atruong]]

(In reply to Kadir Topal [:atopal] from comment #9)
> Maybe an alternative would be to show a live preview of the post?

That would work but users still don't know about <br>...

Comment 11

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Adding to next sprint to get an estimation of scope.

Comment 12

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

This *might* be a simple \n -> <br/> jinja2 filter (http://jbalogh.me/projects/jingo/#jingo.helpers.nl2br). Otherwise, we'll figure out something less simple.

Comment 13

[Amir Farsi]

In all forums pressing enter for making new line is common. Anyway i think sumo forum will is not user friendly for normal users with this thing.

Comment 14

[Andrew Truong [:feer56] [:andrewtruong] [:atruong]]

Brought up by ComputerWhiz in SUMO Community Discussion Forum: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/709960?last=57052#post-57052

Comment 15

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Let's try the solution Ricky suggested. If that doesn't work, we can still decide if this is worth it.

Comment 16

[Wesley Branton]

Something that get on my nerves on the forms is the fact that you cannot simply go to the next line when typing something.
You either need to put the < br> HTML line break tag or double space the line.

Is there a specific reason for this?

Comment 17

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

Q1 is over. Bring it on, Q2!

Comment 18

[John Hesling [:John99] (NeedInfo me)]

We do have the icons to format as numbered or bulleted lists/paragraphs, but they are decidedly none intuitive in use as discussed in 
"what am I doing wrong." https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/710183
1. format list
2. then highlight
3. then use icon

Comment 19

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

John, can you file another bug for that? This one is about line breaks, which we should actually give another try.

Comment 20

[John Hesling [:John99] (NeedInfo me)]

I will file a bug if you consider the icon based formatting system is worth changing. (If only to document better, or add an explanatory dropdown on mousover)

I added my last comment more as a reminder that if this particular change is considered costly we already have an existing  system in place for precisely the use cases envisaged: 
starting new lines 
and creating lists. 
Lists such as lists of five Crash IDs or sequential steps in an explanation. 
The bulleted or numbered lists may be a better solution that the newline method being proposed here. 

It makes me wonder do we really need the change discussed here.

Another alternative method of starting a new line is to use the <pre> </pre> markup tags, although as mentioned methods may not be user friendly or discoverable. Just preceding a line with a space immediately after the Return also has a similar effect but again is not easily discovered.

Comment 21

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

(In reply to John Hesling [:John99] from comment #20)
> I will file a bug if you consider the icon based formatting system is worth
> changing. (If only to document better, or add an explanatory dropdown on
> mousover)

John, it's not up to me to decide that. Madalina is the champion for the forums, for feature requests you should talk to her, but since this could also be seen as a bug, you could just go ahead and file it. In any case, I'm afraid putting a reminder into this bug won't help much.

Comment 22

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

Pretty sure mythmon tried adding `white-space: pre;` and it fixes this issue.

Comment 23

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

Putting in the right component. There is no mention of questions (aka Support Forum) here, so we'll just do the discussion/contributor/community forums for now.

Comment 24

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Yes, please do this for the support forum as well. One major issue is that users don't know about our formating and are confused, so it would be particularly helpful for them.

Comment 25

[Rehan Dalal (Inactive)]

Landed:
https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/commit/b921977dff821249879a0930332ad6288968fb17
https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/commit/45b46fc43d3ad429a5ddacbe0647ccd9388dcdc4

Comment 26

[Rehan Dalal (Inactive)]

Pushed to production a couple of hours ago by Ricky.