I don’t like the loss of control that the new editor takes away during composition of a posting. At least give us back what we had.
May I suggest a membership poll to help guide the decision?
Or, better yet, the dual view (Write/Preview) that GitHub offers that you could toggle back and forth! 
Yes, I didn’t like the new “rich text” editor either. It took me a while to find it initially, but there is a way to go back to the split Markdown/Preview on the toolbar - it’s the “A” or “M ↓” button:
There is a way to set the default for everyone. We (and our regular members) may be more technical and prefer the simplicity of Markdown. Or that it was Discourse's way for so long - why change it?
For the less technical savvy and new users - would rich text (WYSIWYG) be more familiar to keep as the new default option? I'm open to any thoughts on changing the default.
Maybe worth taking to the polls:
I didn't know about this toggle until you just mentioned it, so I vote for the Markdown method.
Not sure why we have to choose when we have the toggle. Make markdown the default if you want, but please don’t make me use Markdown in 2025 and give me the option to use RT.
Keep markdown but leave RT as an option
Why do people always want to change what works ?
It's just discussion of a new default since a recent update changed this. Both options will be available. It's just whether we accept this new default or keep the status quo (Markdown, since this community started 10 years ago).
Being a retrospective future community, I wondered if we'd be adverse to change
The setting help text reads:
Set the default mode for your community's composer. Rich text mode provides a more modern, familiar writing experience for most users, while Markdown mode may be suitable for more technical audiences. Members can use a toggle in the composer toolbar to switch between modes.
The consensus I'm getting is: It doesn't need changing. Users familiar with Discourse communities can easily toggle it. Users new to Ubuntu communities (and possibly less technical) will appreciate rich text.
Prior to the switch being done, the toggle button did not exist.
After the switch, we now see that toggle button available.
More importantly, that toggle setting appears to be individualized, because I tested it, and logout/login will offer the last chosen toggle setting, which is all I care about.
So, if the default becomes Rich Text, I no longer care as much, just so long as someone down the road doesn't decide that the toggle function, and the Community Member's choice should go away. If that were to happen, I would be VERY unhappy!
How I visualize that is by seeing a "checkbox" adjacent to the current icon/button of the adressee, and clicking on that would offer a checklist of the Members that posted the most-recent 5/10 messages (to limit the overhead from those long discussions).
I truly believe that some users might get frustrated with the RT default, if they try to insert their markdowns in that mode, which led me to raising the point of discussion.
I think that the Markdown mode, with adjacent preview, is an excellent environment to help new users in developing their skills while interracting with others in the Community.
Having the Markdown mode as default, would explicitly raise their awareness of the capability's availability to them.
However, as I said earlier, with the button now geing available for the Markdown option, I don't personally need the default to be Markdown. I just don't see how not having that would benefit the new Users, to be honest.
Discourse doesn't support replies to multiple people. It's designed to be able to address a specific post (person) or the entire topic (green reply button). Feel free to raise the suggestion over on their community:
(Not for me, I think the current reply system is simple enough. If a topic gets too long or drifts off-topic, it should be split up by moderators instead)
Likewise, since it's open source software, there might be answers to when/why/how they added the rich text feature, and declared the new default. I can't imagine Discourse will remove the Markdown editor without controversy.
I do agree that I like the side-by-side code/preview, that's how I started with various Discourse communities. I find rich text to introduce the old age problem of text getting muddled up when things don't copy & paste cleanly.
I don’t really care if people want to use Markdown, whatever works for you, but there are a lot of new people coming to linux and I think it would be better to default to Rich Text. Linux is already overwhelming for beginners so why add to it by defaulting to Markdown.
Personally, I prefer RT, and this is coming from an old school guy, like several of you are... I actually used carbon copies, I learned all my bad coding habits with GOTO loops in basic, I started using word processors that required HTML tags. My first email system was cc:Mail… so I get old school and I get the appeal of using markdown, but RT is so much easier for me to use.
I might have agreed with you, except that when I was trying to insert my html/markdown down, the Editor's behaviour has changed since the last switchover, and my "inserts" don't survive re-opening my postings for editing/revising/correcting.
That is my main gripe! Something is different, and it is not just the toggle for default interraction mode!
I prefer the “Markdown” version, but please keep the RichText option, too.
Cannot tell what the default option should be. As long as one can switch the option, any default option should be fine (at least for me).
