Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-5269370-20131114222304

When new users join this site, the overwhelming majority of the time they join for posting a story. So they click Contribute, click Add a Page and then are brought to the Visual Mode editor. Now whether they have a story copied and ready to paste, or if they're about to spend the next hour or so writing it all down is irrelevant to the point I'm trying to get here. I'm encouraging new users to use Source Mode straight off the bat, because let's face it, visual mode is a horrible way of contributing/editing a story.

When new users copy a story from Microsoft Word or another source, it creates rich text coding in source mode which usually appears normally in Visual. There is the risk however, of one little wrong adjustment and then BAM! The whole story becomes one giant array of rich-text mess, with words buried within. Copying and pasting into source mode in the first place will help prevent this from happening.

This same issue is prone to ruining the formatting of the stories posted. Often, posting straight into visual mode will create not just broad, gaping breaks between paragraphs but also inconsistent formatting. Among this, could be different styles of font or even different colours of font, which is not acceptable on a site which keeps strictly to one font and one colour.

My next point, is media. Posting videos and photos in Visual Mode is another factor that can disrupt formatting. I often find when editing pastas, that the photo/video upsets the division between 2 paragraphs because it is attached to text in Source mode, rather than on a separate line. Adding a file onto a separate line in Source Mode leaves formatting unaffected and tidy.

Finally, I should point out, if it isn't already obvious, that source mode puts a litte red, zig-zaggy line under a word when it is misspelled. I believe that if new users were more aware of this, then the quality of stories posted here could potentially improve drastically.

I ask, that if there's a way of automatically displaying Source Mode first for new users, then I firmly should be using it. All in all, it creates the opportunity for better quality of stories with better grammar and better formatting. It could also potentially reduce the workload for Admins, VCROC and active editors on this Wikia.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments below! 