Allow communities to disable the WYSIWYG editor

[yurikhan]

Title
Allow communities to disable the WYSIWYG editor

Short, concise description of the idea
Provide a way for community owners/maintainers/moderators to disable the rich text editor, so that everybody who wants to post has to use the HTML editor.

Full description of the idea
Currently, LiveJournal offers two ways to post; the classic HTML editor where the poster sees all markup and has to keep it in mind, and the rich text editor where the poster clicks buttons and the editor generates markup.

The markup generated by the rich text editor is often excessive and non-semantical, especially if formatted text is copy/pasted from Word or another web site. Posters cannot easily see that their post specifies white background, gray text, a fixed font size or a hardcoded font face such as Proxima Nova or Helvetica Neue.

Such posts are annoying when viewed in a customized Friends feed or even in the list of community posts.

The ru_chgk community, for example, has an explicit rule against excessive and obnoxious markup, and it is violated on a regular basis.

I propose that there should be a per-community preference that community owners and/or maintainers and/or moderators could activate, which would disallow posting through the rich text editor to their community. Everybody who wants to post would need to think carefully about any markup they use.
An ordered list of benefits

• Readers benefit by seeing all community posts in a reasonably consistent style.
• Posters benefit by having an incentive to learn HTML.
• Posters also benefit by being confident they are not unknowingly annoying their readers.
• Moderators benefit by having less yelling to do.
• The Internet benefits by becoming closer to the ideal of semantic markup.
• Kittens benefit by not being killed by gods every time somebody posts in 12px #333 Proxima Nova on a white background at 19.6px line height.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• Would-be posters who are incapable of learning the basics of HTML lose by not being able to post in communities that have activated the proposed switch.
• Internet providers and mobile carriers indirectly lose by having less data to transfer and therefore less money to extort from users.