Move the formatting suggestions just below where your "Title" is placed and you will see a higher uptake - guaranteed. Blaming Users for Poor UI design smacks of unwarranted arrogance - never a desirable trait.

Worse, those big blue buttons in random alignments grab all the attention and make the text even harder to read (they should probably be plain old links).

Users shouldn't have to read a manual of markdown tags to enter text on a site, not unless it does some really special stuff.

Ok, so there is the preview but I must admit that I would probably think that the preview is broken, if such a simple thing such as line breaks aren't displayed correctly. I've encountered so many broken things in web apps that I'd simply assume that this preview is broken, too. It wouldn't occur to me that there is a special syntax for something as simple as a line break.

Agreed!

One way I get round that is to run text through a Markdown parser first then do a regex to replace \n with <br />

That seems to work fairly will ~99% of the time.

(I do like Markdown though - compared to, for example, BBCode. It degrades fairly gracefully, ignoring the line break issue, so you can just write a chunk of text and it looks good but formatting is fairly easy to pick up and eventually intuitive for more advanced users)

this turns out to be just as ugly.

how do you get to the 99%?? i would say there are more people pressing ENTER when they really want a line-wrap then people writing textwalls.

The textwalls problem I don't have a solution too :)

I'm not saying that it's at all well-explained on the site, but there is at least a reason behind it.

There's also a loss of information in the example. The user typed "\\<path to shared folder>\c". Markdown produced "\\c". I do understand it was interpreted as html tag. But I feel it had to be ignored - there's no "path" tag in html.

Edit: It was difficult to get this comment posted properly on Coding Horror - had to use &lt; and &gt; It's much nicer here on HN. KISS at its best!

Lack of richtext editor support in browsers has been the problem so far - but I believe mostly there with contentEditable support in all browsers?

Everyone's brain knows a block of text in the right-side column of a web page is an ad and provides nothing useful to the task at hand.

So I think it's worth playing devil's advocate: is there some point at which we're justified in expecting the user to just grow up and read, or give a little bit of thought to what you're doing? Why do we, in the software industry, beat ourselves up so much, when the rest of the world is given a free pass?

I mean, whether it's figuring out how to use some kind of glue, or operating the PBX system, or planting a garden, and on and on, we expect that the user is going to read something about what the heck he's doing. Why not with computers?

Even then, you'll find that some users will just spend their time looking for a way to get rid of the help (and do what they came to do), rather than read it.

"Want be understood? Format your text using the simple formatting guide on your right."

So, it points out how to achieve their goal (being understood) but it doesn't clutter their line of sight with too much information.

I wouldn't want this guy doing usability design on my site. Woof.

thats about it. teach them that and you get 80% readable ascii.