I thought I'd get in early this month because I'm particularly pleased with my latest change, though that probably means it will turn out to be horribly broken:
Writeups, Scratch Pads and home nodes submitted with no paragraph or br tags will now have them inserted invisibly, AS IF BY MAGIC, depending on where line breaks appear in the source. Writeups which already have paragraph breaks in them will not be affected.
Yes folks, I am writing this node without inserting ANY HTML AT ALL unless I feel like it, and it still looks fine. This makes me very happy, and even leads me to consider whether to turn off the WYSIWYG editing option entirely, or at least move it further into the background. HTML is finally an optional extra, handy for formatting but not something you necessarily need to worry about.
Technical details for the interested: I have added a new function to HTML.pm called breakTags, which is called by displaywriteuptext and Scratch Pads and also displayUserText. I guess I'll add it to a few other places later. Call gets much of the credit for the code, although I did cannibalise it to do br tags as well as p, so I take the blame if and when it doesn't work.
As of the 8th of December, it also skips over blocks of pre-formatted text and lists, which generally don't need extra line breaks in them. This makes us better than LiveJournal. Thanks to rootbeer277 for both the suggestion and the code.
Only a few other minor things to report right now, since my last Root Log... Editors can no longer remove ed-cools by other active editors; we need to ask nicely, instead. Node Heaven was broken for Level 0 users for a while after the XP system switchover - it turns out that the old Voting/Experience FAQ page was not joking when it said that access to Node Heaven was a Level 1 power. I turned on the writeup hit counter by default (but not for Guest User) - turn it off in Writeup Settings if you hate it. I fixed a bug with collaboration nodes which was causing them to throw invisible server errors when they were edited, I can't tell if that made any difference at all to anything else. I started playing with some code to make votes reversable, but I haven't got it to work properly yet.
More later.