Hard News: The Short and Long of It
339 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 … 7 8 9 10 11 … 14 Newer→ Last
-
Ah, interfaces. Many ideas, happy to provide more detail offline if desired. Realise some of them may be beyond current priorities/budgets but hopefully may resonate at some stage.
Edit for five minutes seems to work elsewhere. Echoing others upthread, I vote for preview to refresh any new posts - and for easier ways to add formatting.
Something to make quoting easier too - maybe linked to the Reply button. Making that button really useful - for instance, automatically citing and linking to the source post - might also provide a way of monitoring whether anyone has replied to one of my posts like someone asked for, and directing me to the replies. Might need to allow for more than one citation per post, the way we seem to reply here.
If quoting is left as tagging, given that you have non-standard formats anyway then why not shorten to <q>?
Make the standard text size bigger please - can always use the browser to make it smaller if desired but why should the default be microscopic just because young designers think it looks prettier.
I support moderators starting up new threads when really unrelated topics pop up during the day, like David has done a bit lately. Readable narrative style is enjoyable but it is harder to skip through or filter if you have less time. Some form of peer rating and tagging would be handy, along with browsing/search that used them. Reader tagging could create our own local folksonomy. With a bit of stewardship that could build into a rich PAS glossary/dictionary with its own links to related resources and opportunities for mining local content.
Not something you need on most other sites, but I am keen on the "remember where I was up to" option for those ongoing conversations. Maybe let me click on the last post before I go away, which might also let you implement this alongside a single page for all comments. If the thread goes long enough, the refreshes would make up for pageviews, surely. Perhaps the number of posts per page could be a user setting?
Heck, maybe remember which threads I had open and reload them all when I come back. Bonus points for each one loaded where I was up to, and even more for showing me posts replying to any of mine. Go on Cactus-elves, you know you want to. Bookmark All Tabs in Firefox is only partway there. Suppose I could start using RSS, but does it handle comments here or just the initial post?
Unless there are compelling pagerank advantages, putting all the contacts for each poster somewhere else would also be a better use of space and allow for new contact methods - maybe dynamically show/hide them on clicking the poster's name if they need to be on the same page?
Finally, Report needs to have some way to go promptly to the moderator's most-monitored contact method. It also needs to put you back where you were before clicking it, not on the first page of the thread.
-
Some form of peer rating
Nightmare!
-
Some form of peer rating
Nightmare!
Agree, I miss Usenet but not quite that much.
-
Some form of peer rating
Nightmare!
Peer rating sounds very scary. Sort of like a popularity contest but more detailed as to why people don't like you. I would fail. Very badly.
-
Maybe let me click on the last post before I go away,
We had this on the second-to-last build of Bardic Web, and it was great. Basically, a little pin you could stick next to a comment for whatever reason - I've read up to here, I need to go and check something before I reply to this, whatever. And another click removed it. Users really loved it.
-
Kong,
Expecting multilingualism from a spell checker is asking a lot. Not a bad idea, but there are some issues that should be thought of. For starters, it has no way of knowing which language you meant a word in, so it would stop picking up typos (one of the main points of a spellchecker), if those typos are words in one of the other languages. So you meant 'is', but you typed 'si', and because you accept both English and Italian, it lets it slide. Mind you this happens within a language pretty often to (spelling mistake intended, to make the point).
Also, just because a spell checker can't recognize anything other than the main language you use, doesn't make it totally useless. It still helps in that one language, and even ESL folk write predominantly in English on here. For them, English spelling is actually something that help can be appreciated for.
But there's an argument for allowing users to decide how they want it to be, and if they interweave the languages extensively I can see that having half of the page highlighted is going to draw attention away from the one actual spelling mistake, making the feature kinda useless. It would be neat if you could just choose to add to the languages, accepting the issue I spoke of above as the lesser of evils. Another idea might be to be able to choose a predominant language (and be able to change this at will) and have the other languages highlighted in a different color to the simple spelling mistakes. So then you look first at the red stuff (most likely to be real mistakes) then you look at the green stuff (huh? Did I really use some Italian that time? No, that's a typo, cheers spell checker).
It is possible for users to help themselves a lot with spell checkers. I always 'teach' them, and it might seem like a pain to try to teach the checker an entire language, but bear in mind that in almost all languages there is a real bulge in the frequency towards the most used words, so the returns from using 'Add to dictionary' stack up really quickly. You may have to click it a thousand times, but after that it's learned the words you use 90% of the time, and adding in extra ones as they come up after that isn't a huge chore, could be worth it for the help. I speak one other language and did exactly this, and find that it's now helpful in both languages. It still gets any new words in the second language wrong, but I add those words in (after making sure that I spelled them right), and on we go.
I can see a market opening out there for some tool that can merge dictionaries for the main user platforms to work around these issues, if there isn't one already. I couldn't find one from a brief search. By merging I mean, basically selecting your languages from a list and making a meta-dictionary, which you then have on your local machine (or you could carry it in a memory stick or store it online somewhere). Anyone know of such a thing? I'm tempted to write one, the merging algorithm would not be the least bit hard.
-
Sort of like a popularity contest but more detailed as to why people don't like you. I would fail. Very badly.
You would win, muchly. I would click the thumbs-up every time I saw your name.
Apropos of edits: I clicked preview and corrected this little error...
the thump-up
...before posting.
-
@Kong -- US spelling is silly. A very few superficial changes, while not really addressing the core issues. Why change honour to honor, when it could just be onor, for example?
Embitteringly, that te reo plugin is not compatible with 3.5.1 :(
-
Peer rating sounds very scary. Sort of like a popularity contest but more detailed as to why people don't like you.
Jackie, I just meant the one click thumbs-up thing for each post - certainly not for the person as a whole.
I trust that enough readers here would guide me about comments worth paying extra attention to - or ignoring if in a hurry, whereas on some sites it would just tell me whether comments conformed with shallow prejudices. I expect better than playground behaviour in these parts.
We had this on the second-to-last build of Bardic Web, and it was great. Basically, a little pin you could stick next to a comment for whatever reason - I've read up to here, I need to go and check something before I reply to this, whatever. And another click removed it. Users really loved it.
Ta, Emma. Great to hear it's been done and was valuable. I was thinking you'd have good ideas for Russell given your moderating experience. Can I also note that was not the first post in the list when I searched for "Emma moderation"..
-
All the spellcheckers I've encountered are monolingual and that's just wrong. I'd love it if they were able to accommodate more than one language at any one time, for reasons of obviousness.
I run several browsers for different reasons but tend to use Opera for PAS. Opera has a spellcheck add on from Aspell and you can add as many languages as you like. You can also teach it your own "personal" spellings.
I still can't understand why it only has 2% of the browser market. -
Embitteringly, that te reo plugin is not compatible with 3.5.1
Being a late adopter triumphs again. :)
-
I still can't understand why it only has 2% of the browser market.
Not from the US of A?
-
Opera comes from Norway, I didn't know that.
Norway is, in some ways similar to New Zealand but not many. -
But wait, there's more
-
I see, Sacha. Like Facebook has, you mean. Danielle, Deborah and I are all very familiar with that function. I, too, Deborah would be thumbs upping to all your comments.
-
Way to get sidetracked.
Anypoo. How about a button under our ID column, like the one to send eMail, to send other stuff, great tie in opportunities for Russell there. We could have things like "Send a Flower" through Interflora or what have you. Or send a Pony for those special people, or send a Cake. Or even and I like this one. Send a Hitman for certain posters from Taiwan.
;-) -
International pony post. :)
-
I, too, Deborah would be thumbs upping to all your comments.
But because they're good ones, right, not just because you like each other?
-
I only want that feature if you can use it to help show or hide some comments - and only optionally, not all the time.
-
I am still in the 'nightmare' camp. Sorry team. If I make the world's worst pun, I don't want hordes of unknown people thumbs-downing me. I would prefer our current 'embarrassed silence', thanks. :)
-
And somewhere a child waits......
Silently for a pun.
;-) -
How about if only people who post get to vote?
-
Really *hate* the idea of voting/ranking - I think it against the ethos of this site.
Mind you, I'd give Jackie Clark - and at least 30 others, a thumbs up any time...
How about the kind of emoticons - for when we feel especially delighted or saddened - that some other sites (I am thinking of AVEN)
have?
O, and may I say how much I like really small avatar icons? -
Clearly not a popular idea. :)
-
I agree it's against the ethos of the site. You like somebody's comment, you can always point it out through them whatchamacallem, words. And if you disagree, ditto. Generally I find that keeping up with the forums I like takes quite enough time without the added task of registering a binary like and dislike of comments, optional as it may be.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.