Forum improvements: faster pages & markdown support

Hi all,

I’ve just completed another round of updates and improvements to the forum.

Most noticeably, we now have full support for the Markdown formatting syntax which is a welcome alternative to using HTML to format your posts. HTML is still supported though so you can use it if you wish. You may find that using the <code> tag is still the most convenient way to get syntax highlighting so you can still use that.

Another more subtle improvement is that the forum should generally be snappier as I’ve optimised a lot of our customisations to eat less CPU. This will be most noticeable when editing a reply you just made, which used to be horrendously slow.

If you’ve subscribed to email notifications of new posts, you’ve probably received a few from me while I have been setting this stuff up. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a sandbox environment to do this yet.

We have some other ideas on how to make things better that we’ll look at implementing some time in the future.

Happy Gradle Forum’ing.

Care to share what the final conclusion was from the research on the getsatisfaction editing slow down?

It was a combination of their attempt to dynamically resize the text editor based on post height and all of the page rewriting we do to customise it the way we need.

Basically, I had to remove their resizing and be a lot smarter about what we rewrite and when.