itsthejoker
commented
5 years ago We have a couple of options as to how to deal with this; here's what immediately comes to mind. For the record, the reason we have the abomination of a footer is to get around a rendering issue in the official mobile client. The footer as coded displays legibly on New Reddit, Classic Reddit, the official mobile clients, and third party clients. We can reasonably say that we care less about third party clients, but that still leaves the official mobile client as the source of our woes.
1) Plead with reddit to please fix the rendering engine on mobile (CREATE-1647 - https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/87tkvj/comment_formatting_for_alpha_and_classic/dxhs0ly/
2) Plead with reddit to let the fancy pants editor detect markdown and switch automatically (I think there's a ticket for this, but I can't find the number)
3) Wait for Reddit to fix the individual issues we're seeing with the fancy pants editor eating the formatting (CREATE-2474 - https://www.reddit.com/wiki/markdown#wiki_differences_from_old_reddit-flavored_markdown and more)
4) Accept that there will be differences and use the in_redesign_beta flag to change the validation on the fly
5) Make the transcription validation less strict to account for these issues
6) Do nothing.
Right now new Reddit strips out formatting from the footer (old Reddit shows 2 carats at the beginning, while new Reddit only shows 1). Because of this, the bot cannot find transcriptions unless they are written in old Reddit. There are also similar issues when transcriptions are made using the mobile app.
A possible solution may be to check the user's opt-in status for the redesign: /api/v1/me/prefs - in_redesign_beta and have the bot check accordingly.