I read many many books and newspapers, all without different sized fonts, funny colors, smileys, giving me perfectly good information.
People should in basics just use plain and understandable language to communicate.
You find they serve a purpose for readability, to me they work the exact opposite, and makes it more difficult for me to quickly get the the gist of the question/message.
I am not saying this to put my foot down or anything, but honestly: the chances that I will answer questions from users that will add those 'funny stuff' to postings will be much, much slimmer than me answering a well written and explained question.
And as my role as moderator, the last thing I am waiting for to have to do is to reprimand users because needless use of smileys, colors, large fonts etc.
Thankfully until now it's not a kindergarten here, and I really hope it stays that way.
Please, of course no offense AvikB, but as you can see I feel quite strongly about this.
I do agree at some point. Lets get few fact straight:
Basic and necessary button that are required:
Bold, Italic, Underline, Strike, image, link, code, quote(
I REFUSE TO REMOVE CODE AND QUOTE!, specially typing the
blockquote is really not intuitive and painful)
Left align, center align(used by our addon devs, i don't use it much, but i don't think it will be that much of a nuisance for it to be removed completely)
And there is youtube video(which is new). Since giffy is allowed, i don't think a video will kill anyone. also helpful for tutorial, bug, and maybe some future unknown use.
As for color, i may remove it. since it may be abused. OR we can only show few color options(like red, blue, green, black, and magenta) this colors are used for different info, even on this thread we used them for forum structuring discussion and announcement.
as for font size how about we allow upto size 6 or 5 instead of 7. Removing this completely may not be necessary, but i might do so if really needed.
ofc if someone REALLY WANT TO ABUSE THEM THEY CAN USE THE CODE DIRECTLY!