Take this thread as an example. I want to comment about it on this board instead of hijacking the original thread.

How do all those obnoxious color codes get inserted into such posts? It looks like they were created by some other program then pasted into the post. That is not the only thread I have seen like that. As a moderator I don't have the time to edit out all that crap and insert proper, acceptable code tags.

There's not really much we can do about it, though.

The only explanation I have is that maybe the users tried to manually color each line with the WYSIWYG editor, but didn't realize that [code=c] doesn't accept colors. Perhaps it could? That would solve *some* of the problems.

There is some poor-quality colorizer available to folks. It's been around for a while.

I'm very confused - apparently I came to the thread too late after the weird coloring was fixed. Essentially joeprogrammer is correct in that color tags within [code=language] tags are ignored because that tag automatically colors code for you, hence its purpose.

Actually there is a way.

The moderators have to just replace the [code=c] with [code] tags and it should turn out to be fine.

If you will again look at the first post of the thread under consideration, it was edited by me and now it looks relatively okay.

The way to remove those color tags is to highlight the post (Ctrl-A) and click the weird A in the upper left corner of the edit box.

I'm confused. Why are moderators editing the colors of other people's code to begin with?

Because many users use color tags instead of using code tags. The original link to this thread which ~S.O.S.~ kindly corrected had both color tags and code tags, and the color tags were still visible making the code difficult to read.

I've seen some posts that contain hundreds of those color tags. I don't edit them out because it just takes too much time. I don't think I should have to spend a great deal of time deleting each one of those [ color=1234 ] and [ /color ] tags with a very high probability that I will delete something else I should not; I'm not that patient and I don't want that much torture. Which is why I started this thread -- the color tags appear as if they were machine/program generated.

The only need to have manual colors for code is when a user needs to highlight a specific line (for example, "this is the line where the error occurs"). Otherwise the coloring should be the same on all posts.

Most users who post here are ignorant of either code tags and/or automatic coloring. They then either try to manually color the code without code tags (that's the worst, believe me!) or sometimes they add the colors inside a [code=language] tag, which was the problem here.

For those who missed it - this is basically how it looked:

The deceptive thing about this is that the WYSIWYG editor actually colors the code, so if you don't preview your post, you won't realize that the color tags don't show up inside [code=language] tags. (see attachment)

Also, the thing that makes the colors look really funky is that the # symbol in C++ means the command is a preprocessor definition, which in DaniWeb's code coloring scheme turns the code all green. Ugh!