Okay, first, need to help clarify a couple things with you:
- What you're seeing isn't HTML, it's BBcode. It may be HTML-esque, but it's not HTML. Pedantic, I know, but it helps to properly identify what we're dealing with and its limitations.
- Second, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) isn't enabled by default on this SMF install for this community.
- Third, WYSIWYG mode isn't going to solve your problems, and I'll explain why here shortly.
- Fourth and final, your biggest problem is actually a community culture problem that I've brought up for years here that nobody has taken much care towards, and I'll explain that after.
Now, about WYSIWYG mode in SMF. If you want to enable that mode by default, you will need to go here in your user profile (
Profile > Modify Profile > Look and Layout), and then enable the checkmark next to "Show WYSIWYG editor on post page by default." near the bottom of the page before the dropdown menu settings for topic and message display count per page. You can also toggle WYSIWYG mode off and on by clicking on the little
[↖] button there at the end of the editor options. This said, I'm not going to recommend turning it on by default, as there's a reason why the raw text editor is enabled by default instead.
That reason? Because the WYSIWYG editor only works on
bold,
italic,
underline,
strikethrough,
subscript,
superscript, unordered and ordered lists,
preformatted
left
right and
center alignment,
font face/
size/
color,
hyperlinks,
horizontal rules, and embedded images.
It unfortunately does
not work with
glow,
shadow,
teletype, tables, code, spoilers, and most importantly, "
quote". All the most useful bits that you'd want WYSIWYG on while editing won't
actually WYSIWYG. This isn't to say hiding any other formatting can't help relieve
some of the confusion, but that brings us to my other point on why you're having problems.
It's a lack of oldskool forum etiquette and manners, and that's been the standard of this community for as long as I've been here, and I have a low three digit account and joined in the first three weeks of the place going live. It's always been like this. If it's any comfort, the deep nested quotes past a single or double nesting at most drive me up a wall, too... as does the perpetual habit for people to quote entire posts in response, especially for short replies. I cut my netiquette teeth on forums back in the day where this sort of posting behavior was a ban-able offense, so I tend to try not to quote entire posts and only relevant bits with replies, and I try to avoid ever nesting quotes past two levels. It's a courtesy, even and especially today with all the mobile phone users reading the forums with their phones in vertical mode and the responsive design theme narrows the whole mess down to less than 400em... because nothing says classy forum etiquette like posting replies that have quotes so deep the oldest quote is one letter wide by as many lines long as the post has letters and having to scroll forever through that on a phone just to read "PTF" or "+1", or something. But I'm not gonna lie, it's hard work to do that cleanup when potentially replying to stuff like that, and it takes a lot of effort to pay attention to where all the moving parts are as well as keeping track of
nested code structure with it all. It's something you just kinda... learn to tolerate... posting here... or you just learn to dodge the entire quote train when replying. You learn to keep an unedited copy in a notepad window and use the "preview" button... A LOT.
I know it's not the answer you want, and it's not the critique of the forum community that a lot of people want to read, but it's the truth, it's reality, and it's a problem. It's why a lot of the older forum moderators in other communities used to be such hardasses about that sort of thing. It's literally a usability problem. Welcome back, best of luck learning to live with it.
