Blockquote formatting is broken

[alexwlchan]

For example:

• http://blog.stackexchange.com/2009/01/reputation-bounty-for-unanswered-questions/

• http://blog.stackexchange.com/2009/02/new-datacenter-migration/

• http://blog.stackexchange.com/2009/05/server-fault-public-beta-nears/

  

In the source files, all these blockquotes have an opening <blockquote> tag, but all the inline formatting is in Markdown. It’s skipped by the Markdown parser, so the formatting comes out raw.

I would put in a pull request for this, but it’s ~180 posts and I don’t really have time to do that right now.

[JonHMChan]

This is a known issue. The import we used didn't parse blockquotes correctly, and we decided to simply manually repair those posts with high traffic or recently added for the launch. Otherwise, it's been treated as an acceptable trade-off.

It'll simply require slowly fixing those formatting errors one at a time.

[alexwlchan]

I’ve had a look through a few dozen of the posts, and I’ve tried a very simple heuristic to see if I can fix it in one fell swoop. I’m just building the site – I’ll open a pull request if I think I can make a useful improvement.

@JonHMChan I already had some of the work done; I just wanted to be sure there wasn’t an easy fix in your auto cleanup scripts before I dived into it. :-)

[alexwlchan]

@JonHMChan I think my method gives a pretty reliable way of fixing the broken blockquotes, yay. I’m just inspected the generated posts by hand to make sure it hasn’t done anything really silly. It’s also flushing out a bunch of other small formatting errors, which I’ll fix.

But this change touches nearly 200 posts. Would you prefer the change to show up in a single monolithic commit, or for me to break it up into smaller commits? If the latter, how should I break it up?

[JonHMChan]

@alexwlchan One major commit is fine.

[shu8]

If we want to help, do we just change the markdown in blockquotes to proper HTML tags? @JonHMChan

[alexwlchan]

@shu8 Actually, I think I might have fixed most of them already. (It was a couple of PRs ago, but I forgot to update the issue.) Mostly hand-inspecting the broken posts, and modifying as appropriate.