Fullscreen editor - Page 3

[Dani]

Glad you like it. Yay!

[Dani]

So, as it turns out, after thinking about it a little more, I'm not going to implement Rev Jim's suggestion. I'm sorry, Jim!!

The reasoning is because I remembered that newbies are forced to select tags that are only relevant to the forum they are currently in. So, for example, when posting in the Community Center, newbies are only given a choice of about a dozen or so Community Center relevant tags to pick from. They couldn't select the java tag even if they wanted to.

Therefore, asking them if they have the wrong forum upon selecting the java tag could never happen.

So these guys are posting coding issues to community and selecting community-limited tags? Nice.

[Dani]

Log out and you'll see what they see.

As I usually use mobile to peruse. Logging out doesn.t show me anything much. What am I supposed to see?

[Dani]

When you log out and go to create a new community center thread, you will see that instead of the freeform textbox to add tags, with the suggestions pop up, instead you're just presented with a grid of suggestions and can only pick from among them.

[Traevel]

Therefore, asking them if they have the wrong forum upon selecting the java tag could never happen.

Not to pile on a ton of work, but couldn't the analysis be applied on the content they provide instead of the tags they choose? For instance, if they're posting a community center thread, with community tags, but write about java a friendly message pops up suggesting a different forum.

Something that popped up while thinking about the code block parser: couldn't you automatically add the language detected by the highlighter as a tag to the thread? Regardless of forum location, java people would find the posts with java code blocks, and so on.

[Dani]

We have no accurate way of auto detecting language, and being able to accurately determine tags based on a forum post would require quite sophisticated AI to be even remotely accurate.

[Traevel]

Ah, I thought AI was your plan with Reverend Jim's suggestion as well. I wouldn't know of a language detector in PHP, but I know the one github uses is open source (Ruby).

But it's all going to be overkill if its only goal is to get a thread in the correct forum. Would probably be easier to just put a "suggest relocation" button on the page or something.

If you want to limit noobs to a subset of tags on the community forum, especially to stop general programming (or php etc) questions, why have those tags? Seems it's just asking noobs to post there:

So java and php?

[Reverend Jim]

newbies are forced to select tags that are only relevant to the forum they are currently in

Odd because the last one I relocated from the Community forum had the tags code developer programming website which would make the relocation pretty obvious. Those were the tags in place before relocation. They were not added post-move.

[Dani]

The suggested tags are automatically curated from all the recent tags used in the forum by the non-newbies.

Sorry for delay. So php and java tags were curated due to non-noobs using them in the community center? So the more visible they are, the more they're chosen and therefore the more visible they are, the more they're chosen... arghhh!

[Dani]

So php and java tags were curated due to non-noobs using them in the community center?

Yes.

So the more visible they are, the more they're chosen and therefore the more visible they are, the more they're chosen... arghhh!

They were chosen due to non-noobs using them in the Community Center. However, non-noobs are not given a selection in which to pick from, but rather are encouraged to type out their own. Therefore, the cycle is not as strong as you imply. Additionally, they are curated only based on recent activity.

[Traevel]

Is it supposed to be a feature that you can use the editor to edit multiple lines at the same time?

By doing a ctrl-click you can get new cursor instances. Useful for code, but the editor isn't very code friendly anymore so I'm not sure if it's at all needed.

That.s been an annoying feature for some time. Thought it was a trivial bug. Never occurred to me it could be deliberate. +1

[Dani]

but the editor isn't very code friendly anymore so I'm not sure if it's at all needed.

What do you mean by "anymore"? Why isn't it code friendly??

[Traevel]

I mean that it's pointless typing in code longer than a few lines. There's a code block but that's it. No highlighting anymore, not even in preview. You can't select the language yourself anymore. It's really easy to overlap code boxes, or introduce line breaks in the code that you don't want. Getting the indentation right is also harder to do.

It has improved for normal conversations, but not for code in my opinion.

[Dani]

Code highlighting still exists?

int testing()
{
    cout << "hello world";
    return 0;
}

Do you mean when compared to BBCode? We switched to Markdown back in 2012 because BBCode did not really lend itself well to code. We wanted to be more consistent with what Github and Stack Overflow use, to make it easier to post code.

[Traevel]

It does but not while typing or while in preview. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong and it never did that. I liked to select the language myself though. Unless I'm remembering that wrong as well. I also remember using LaTeX here but now I'm not sure about that either. Yet this is pretty much the only Q&A style website I've ever spent real time on.

human(dani).
human(traevel).
mortal(X) :- human(X).

Will it highlight? *drumroll*

[Dani]

It does but not while typing or while in preview. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong and it never did that.

It never did that.

I liked to select the language myself though. Unless I'm remembering that wrong as well. I also remember using LaTeX here but now I'm not sure about that either.

We had the ability to select the language for a very short period of time but it was very buggy. We also had LaTeX support back when we used BBCode. It was removed because literally only 2 people ever used it for legitimate reasons ... ever. But a lot of people put regular text in Latex format so that the font would appear bigger / italics.

[happygeek]

Did you have to remind me that we used to support LaTeX? <shudders from the reanimated memory>

[Dani]

That was a fun experience, right Davey? lol