Forums

Is V3 (or V2 even) going to fix a number of serious forum editor problems?

Sort:
Knightly_News
Knightly_News
Apr 19, 2015
0
#1

I'm using Mac OS X Yosemite (latest) with the latest Safari (but I've also noticed some of these problems with Google Chrome).  These things are so fundamental to basic data entry and the user experience it's hard to know how they'd pass alpha testing, and persist for years, but they have.

  1. When editing the content of posts, the cursor disappears frequently, and I can't figure out where the point of editing is.
  2. When I quote other threads, sometimes the cursor gets trapped in the quotation section, such that, there's no way I can write my own comment outside of the beige background highlight of the post I am quoting.  The workaround entails leaving the page entirely and re-clicking the thread, starting a new post and start to type my reply before quoting.  
  3. I can't click a different post to reply to or start anew once I've started editing a post. Somehow it gets locked into the editing context I've already started.  Workaround same as #2
  4. When I push option+RETURN in an ordered or unordered list (this has an ordered list 1., 2. ,3., 4....) It doesn't insert a blank line, which is the common/expected behavior.
  5. The quote option is good. It would also be great to be able to have a button that created an empty quoted pair, or an HTML blockquote (e.g. indented quotation block) option and/or set the background color of text so one could formulate a quotation of a small passage or an external post. 
  6. Providing underscore and strikethrough option, if not in the icon set, in the UI, have the editor recognize control/command key modifiers like (CTRL or CMD)+S (strikethru) (CTRL or CMD)+U (underscore), would make it a lot more complete.

A great example of a functional well designed forum interface  is StackOverflow.com. It even has a super convenient mark-up language. It's geared more to code. But at least it's a well designed/implemented interface that's solid and could provide a reference.  

Some sort of blend of the chess.com/stackoverflow.com interface would be close to perfect.