Smile

By Jeff Moger - Monday, May 26, 2008

1 Photo

Ahem, so, we hastily added an html editor to most of our webforms on Friday evening. On a positive note, this means when you post an ad, you may now subtly enhance your carefully tuned prose with a few basic formatting options. Bold, italics, underline, and bullet points to start, and for those born after 1983, or anyone else for whom pictures and hieroglyphics constitute the foundation of English vocabulary, smileys!

Over in the negative column, some of you are actually using the new formatting tools! With predictable results I'm afraid. The sort of person who thinks PUTTING EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE will have greater success in attracting your attention can now SHOUT A LITTLE LOUDER IN BOTH UPPERCASE AND BOLD.

We're sorry about that. We really are. In addition to having to remove the more obviously "commercial" Personals, or deleting the dozens of "language exchange" and "Tutor Available" ads posted daily by a certain Mandarin training center that can't quite make up its mind about what their company name should be, we will also now need to clean up the more egregious displays of formatting.

You might be wondering "if you're such a grouch about it, why did you enable html in the first place?" Or, "why are you such a grouch?" Good questions. I can answer the first. Job descriptions, and to a lesser extent Property and Buy&Sell often genuinely need bullet points. However, the editor looked a little plain with just bullet and number lists enabled, so we thought, why not add a little bold, underline and italics. How bad could that be?

We'll see. So if you're thinking of posting an ad (and by all means you should! With a price tag of free, it's one of the better values in Shanghai) please use the formatting in the service of GOOD and not EVIL.

While you're at it, feel free to post a plain text reply below. Enjoy :)