Just a thought...
With the arrival of the new forum, I see a lot of posters have forgotten to use code tags...
Would it be possible to add a simple text prompt (in red!) across the top of the text window...
When a new user has less than xx posts, it says... “When posting code examples, please use the </> code tags to format your text.”
This can disappear after they reach a certain skill level.
During your first two posts, a message is shown on the post composer pane:
Welcome to Arduino Forum — thanks for starting a new conversation!
Does the title sound interesting if you read it out loud? Is it a good summary?
Who would be interested in this? Why does it matter? What kind of responses do you want?
Include commonly used words in your topic so others can find it. To group your topic with related topics, select a category (or tag).
For more, see our community guidelines. This panel will only appear for your first 2 posts.
This text, and that of the "community guidelines" are currently just the stock text provided by Discourse, but it is possible to customize them.
There is also a "Greetings!" PM a new user is directed to read after signing up. This contains an interactive tutorial with a bot where they learn about using the forum and demonstrate their understanding of that information:
The challenge of course is that newbies generally don’t know what they want, and worse still, they’re born without the ability to read.
Maybe the ‘post parser’ needs to look for a few keywords... #define, if (, Serial., etc, and make a guess that it’s actually code... then blast a big red prompt in the text... “USE CODE TAGS !”
Oh poop.
My mind skipped a track… this was meant to be under the New Forum thread !
Sorry, mea culpa.
It came about, because the new forum allows posters to submit very long blocks of code ‘illegally’, which aren’t contained in a scrolling code window… just makes it harder scrolling through untidy posts, especially on mobiles.