Broadly agree with all of this.
Some comments:
#1-3 Cannot agree enough with the first three comments.
#4 You mention bbcode. I'm not as familiar with other ecosystems, but IPS did away with bbcode in its editor in v4. I think the better comparison (and debate) would be WYSIWYG editor versus Markdown, don't you think?
#8 Interesting comment. Is there a reason why you propose a chat style (with its benefit of synchronicity) specifically for PM, and not the community as a whole?
Given that IPS is the outlier here and *the rest of the ecosystem* is bbcode vs Markdown, it’s not an unfair comparison.
Of course, anything beyond the basic-to-modest Markdown is going to bleed into HTML territory as per the MD spec.
The main reason I suggest it is because of the familiarity with other ecosystems - Slack, Discord etc also use Markdown. So does GitHub. The fact these all have slight variations doesn’t put people off the basic use (and even more advanced stuff is converging)
That said I’d still make a differentiation between certain types of content for creation tools, Markdown likely isn’t going to be enough for a complex CMS page, even articles are borderline (even if many of the static site builders out there, e.g. Jekyll, would have you believe otherwise), but for *discussions*, I err very strongly towards keeping the tools very lean and staying out of the way of the people talking, because that’s the key, the talking. Everything else is a distraction.
As for the chat conventions, I’m thinking more about presentation first rather than, say, the mechanics of liveness, but the classic PM systems of 2004 are about replicating email, PM systems of 2014 are about replicating topics, the PM systems of 2024 should function the way users are using other apps - for that, the rivals are WhatsApp, FB Messenger, iMessage, Discord etc. and functionally this is how PMs are used now, so meet that expectation.
Chat as a wider function on a site is always interesting. Functionally it’s no different from chatboxes/shoutboxes of old, or embedding something like the Titan widget for Discord now - it’s competition for attention in a format that encourages currentness and short, rapid answers.
Now this isn’t necessarily a problem - RP is well documented in particular for having chat systems alongside the topics so people can chat, bounce ideas rapidly and then turn that into longer-form topics. But it’s the outlier, it always was in that department. I think it’s possible you could make something work on a broader scale on a forum type site, but you’re basically going to end up chasing something like the Discord experience. This has its own foibles, not least of which is “it’s not as good as Discord” even if it keeps people on the site rather than on a separate service, and even though it will keep the content local and potentially even discoverable if handled correctly. (Something Discord is truly awful at. Everything in Discord should be assumed to be transient even if it isn’t because good luck finding it again.)
