I've made changes to make non-HTML display better. For example, I can type $line= <STDIN>; without CODE tags (like I just did there) and it shows up fine. It used to show up as $line= ;.

I'd like to add a user setting such that "[link]" turns into "[link]" instead of the usual "link". New users would start with this setting turned on so that, if they don't know to use HTML, then their text will still be mostly recognizeable.

But these changes were mostly to help newbie users of the chatterbox. The feature that is supposed to help newbie posters is: PREVIEW. We even have forced preview now. We probably need to add some more hints to let newbie posters understand that the preview actually works and it is their posting that is broken :) (and other interface improvements).

Now, I mostly hate <br /> tags. So I don't want a "convert text to HTML" option because I don't want your text paragraphs to preserve their line breaks such that they don't adjust well to the different display/font sizes of different visitors.

I'd more likely take a hint from POD. I could see detecting blank lines and turning them into <p> automatically (for certain users or if no other HTML mark-up is present or something). And I could see detecting paragraphs with indented lines and putting those into CODE tags automatically (again, only if some test says we have a newbie poster).

Or I could see a button between "preview" and "submit" that tries to make automatic improvements like those in the above paragraph. How should this button be labeled? "Auto-fix HTML"? It could even replace your HTML with filtered HTML...

And I think I'd like to teach PM how to wrap text inside of PRE tags.