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Comment by rpedela | Hacker News Reader

Overall I like it because they closely follow Slack's UI. However I question the choice of fully supporting Markdown. A comment isn't supposed to be documentation. Supporting things like bold, italic makes sense for emphasis or making code easier to read. But headings? When would one ever want really large text in a comment?

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Mattermost team here,

We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we added it because it made sense.

Now we really love it and can't go back: http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-adop...

Headings have a lot of uses for emphasizing text, and there's fun uses too like creating different sized emoticons: http://www.mattermost.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/sheep.p...

##### :sheep:

#### :sheep:

### :sheep:

## :sheep:

# :sheep:

What about text preceded by a # (eg. HTML colors, hash tags, numerals...)? Do you escape # if it's next character is not a whitespace?

Correct, escape if # is not followed by whitespace. Mattermost markdown is based on GitLab Flavored Markdown: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/6-4-stable/doc/...

> We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we added it because it made sense.

What made sense? Is there a use case that requires full Markdown support? If so, what is it?

I use Slack's 'Posts' feature which is a full Markdown post that you can embed in a chat in Slack.

The reasons I use these are: 1. Rich content, organized & clean lists with outbound links for status updates about things I'm working on, linking to Asana/Github 2. Notes from one on ones, or general progress updates that I keep in a private channel and save basically as a stream-of-consciousness/reality log, having them there makes them readily accessible in product and having them in Markdown makes them very readable when I'm browsing through.

In short, I treat Slack rooms almost like I would treat a folder in Dropbox, they just happen to also include some chat between people :P

Headings don't actually imply really large text. They imply differentiation for different levels of text introducing the following section, which can be useful in similar ways as bold and italic. Most stylesheets for markdown do seem to implement the top couple headings with uncomfortably large text, though, which is a bummer. It would be great to see configurable styles for markdown in tools like this.

Perhaps you can submit a pull request disabling the markdown features you don't like

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