Initial thoughts on assisted formatting of discussion posts

Reading this discussion post is making me imagine specifying a discussion-formatting tool. In the fan community of the game Skyrates, we had a tool for taking chat logs from the in-game chat and formatting them for pretty display on web or forum. A similar tool could be used to simplify making chats into posts here.

The basic workflow is to paste a chat log into the tool, then use some combination of auto detection and interactive controls to prettify it into a post.

Besides reducing the formatting work, it could be possible to add fun features, like:

• Introducing participants by full name the first time they speak, and by abbreviation afterwards

• Linking those intros to account profiles on the site

• Colorizing names to mnemonically double-code participants

It would be necessary for the paste input to recognize Facebook and Discord formats. Beyond that I don't know where rationalists tend to chat.

I would think that the next step on this would be to review the prior art and available off the shelf solutions.

Due to limitations of the Less Wrong mobile editor it is tragically impossible not to end this post with a paragraph of only the letter "t".

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