It took me a while to find the "help" button for comments, and we seem to have a steady stream of people who have trouble finding it on their own. I suspect that's because it's floating off in a corner you don't have much reason to look at. Would it be difficult to move it to the immediate right of the "cancel" button, instead of the far right, and possibly rename it "formatting help"?
(I don't know enough python to look at the site's code, or I would check this out myself.)
Relabeling is a good idea - I had no idea it was for formatting help, and have thus ignored it in the past.
I think relabeling it would help more than moving it, but moving it might help.
Change it to "How To Quote".
No, I'm voting for "formatting help".
Unfortunately, "We don't think html is cool enough" is too long. Actually, I think markdown has some improvements over html, but I'm not sure having two sets of habits is worth it.
It's not a matter of coolness, but resistance to abuse. Unrestricted HTML is not an option for comments, because it can contain Javascript, or formatting that breaks the entire page. A restricted subset of HTML could be allowed, but it would be about as complicated to support as Markdown is. Support for Markdown came free with the Reddit code base, but adding restricted HTML as an option would be a nontrivial project.
Agreed on "formatting help" as the link name, but HTML is bad news for making up content. It's way more verbose than Markdown, and I would much prefer not to manually insert paragraph tags. Besides, Github uses Markdown for readmes now, so I can see it becoming something of a standard (if it isn't already).
I would never have known this feature existed if this post hadn't pointed it out to me. Put it next to to the "comment" button, and preferably make it bright red or something. (Ideally, it would be bright red UNTIL you'd clicked on it, and then it'd turn a less obtrusive color).
This change is trivially easy, if people agree that it's desirable. Just change the float:right to float:left of the .commentreply .help-toggle node, at static/lesswrong.css:226.
Definitely move it next to the comment button. I've used it a dozen times and it still takes me a bit to find it, though that's probably the fault of me being scatterbrained as much as anything else. Moving it would be a big help to newbies, who are most likely to need it and least likely to know where/what it is.
Relabeling is probably a good idea too, and I'd suggest "formatting help".
I think relabeling it would help more than moving it, but moving it might help.
Change it to "How To Quote".