Spelling and notification bars

The spelling went away when the old system (vBulletin) was replaced. It has been a constant irritant ever since. People (including me) have asked for it many times. I think there is some technical reason why it is kind of hard to do, but I don't buy it. I think it is long overdue now.

Yeah, unfortunately it went away when we switched to the new system. The spellchecker that you are referring to was a functionality of your browser, not of DaniWeb at all. Most current web browsers have built-in functionality that uses their own dictionary to spellcheck text typed into textboxes.

The problem is that the current DaniWeb textbox is not actually a real HTML textbox at all. It uses Javascript to type into a hidden <div> element. I've played with writing my own Javascript-based spellchecker but to absolutely no avail. Unfortunately it's just not practical to write a JS-based spellchecker.

Is there anyway you could give the end user the opportunity to toggle the reply to be just an ordinary text box. So that way at least we have the choice of the fancy reply box or just an plain textbox + spell checking.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16824810/li-hover-on-navigation-menu

^^Stackover seem to have it working. Maybe sounding a bit dumb because it seems to trivially obvious as I'm sure you would have done it... but they seem to have it referenced as a textarea rather than a div with an id and class?

fdsfs testing

Is there anyway you could give the end user the opportunity to toggle the reply to be just an ordinary text box. So that way at least we have the choice of the fancy reply box or just an plain textbox + spell checking.

The problem with doing that is that the vast majority of our audience (pretty much everyone who doesn't read this specific thread) won't understand why there are two editor interfaces and we'll end up with a lot of people losing a lot of the functionality such as our improved ability to post code snippets. If you were one of the moderators who manually edited the 80,000+ posts that were posted incorrectly because people were trying to manually type in BBCode instead of using the toolbar, you'd understand why that's just not viable. (Asking for some mods to step in and explain better please.)

^^Stackover seem to have it working. Maybe sounding a bit dumb because it seems to trivially obvious as I'm sure you would have done it... but they seem to have it referenced as a textarea rather than a div with an id and class?

SO's editor is just a regular text box (it doesn't support tabbing for code, or any method to indent code for that matter). That's because SO takes the approach of quickly and cleanly deleting every post that is formatted incorrectly. DaniWeb takes the much more manual approach of cleaning up every post that is formatted incorrectly and therefore is much more time consuming on the part of the moderation team in that regard.

Just to clarify the point Dani is making about manually cleaning up posts: when DaniWeb was hit by YAGAU (Yet Another Google Algo Update) Dani put her thinking cap on and looked at potential fixes. One of the things she uncovered was a huge number of posts made using the old vBulletin system where people had either not formatted code at all, or formatted it incorrectly using BBCode. It was determined that these posts, totalling around 80,000 or so, were penalising us as Google interpreted them as junk. And so, in a truly valiant effort which was totally invisible to the community, a bunch of admins and mods spent many hours a day over the course of many weeks manually editing these posts; incorrectly formatted code was reformatted by hand, one posting at a time, until all the posts were corrected. As a result, these historical posts are now properly visible not only to Google but also to any members and guests looking at those question threads who are no longer faced with a mess of code but rather formatted code that is easy on the eye. Going back to the old editor, even as an option, throws up the nightmare scenario of starting the poor code formatting process all over again.

That said, I greatly miss the spellcheck functionality. My eyesight is quite poor these days and unless I run my posts through a spellcheck (cut and paste into another window, check, cut and paste back into editor) there's a good chance that something silly will slip through as I simply hit the wrong keys a lot. Doing that slows down my workflow too much for every time I post, so I tend to only do it for the important/editorial stuff to be honest. End result, I look like an uneducated idiot half the time (no change there then...)

@Happygeek and Dani

Ah I never knew the code editor supports tabbing. I can at least see why this would be useful in the python forums. I still think to be able to toggle this box to an ordinary textarea would be a good idea, especially for the veteran members, spell checking is really important. Even if you created an obscure button somewhere that only people who read this thread would know of, so as not to confuse the other members that would be a step in the right direction. Or even a specific key combination when you highlight the reply area.

Writing a js spellchecker is obviously too much to ask especially as there are way too many languages other than english to support.

Cheers for the info.

Ah I never knew the code editor supports tabbing.

It functions more like an IDE than a textbox. You can tab to indent, shift+tab to go back a tab, etc. It's all color-coded so you can easily see where a link is, what is considered code, etc. None of that is possible with a regular textbox.

It functions more like an IDE than a textbox. You can tab to indent, shift+tab to go back a tab, etc. It's all color-coded so you can easily see where a link is, what is considered code, etc. None of that is possible with a regular textbox.

I believe if we keep a poll to decide between whether to have a spellchecker or whether to have the "tab"ing functionality, spellchecker would win. :)

I have access to moderator tools on both Daniweb and SO and I don't think editing on SO is any more difficult than editing on Daniweb.

That's because SO takes the approach of quickly and cleanly deleting every post that is formatted incorrectly

I'm afraid this isn't true. Spam posts are deleted and trivial/frequently asked/vague questions are closed. But if a post has good content but is formatted incorrectly because the OP doesn't know how to use Markdown or has messed up, the community takes care of formatting the post for the OP. If I'm not mistaken, there is a metric which keeps track of how many meaningful edits you have made but that's just part of the SO number game.

I believe if we keep a poll to decide between whether to have a spellchecker or whether to have the "tab"ing functionality, spellchecker would win. :)

While that may be so, the difference is that without tabbing, people won't post formatted code correctly, and while they might not care/realize about that, it will be a mess for us to constantly clean up. I realllllllly don't want to go back to the way things used to be where we had to manually reformat every other post on the site to add code tags.

I have access to moderator tools on both Daniweb and SO and I don't think editing on SO is any more difficult than editing on Daniweb.

Oh, I'm not talking from a moderator perspective. I'm talking from the perspective of average Joe user who can't tab to indent their code so they just don't bother indenting it.

What I meant about SO was that their audience is aware that SO people are more sticklers, and so by and large they are going to take more time making sure each post is written and formatted correctly and perfect, versus the DaniWeb approach of always taking the path of least resistance and if it's not in your face, not taking the time to figure it out.

Many Browsers have dictionary extensions, such as Firefox. This means that an app integrated into the Browser checks the spelling as you write. I need one because I need to use handwriting recognition, and sometimes the software I use misinterprets my scribble from time to time. Chrome has a built in spellcheck that you may need to enable:

Settings > "Show Advanced Settings" > Under the 'Privacy' heading you will see a tick box (checkbox if you don't have a proper English dictionary) to enable spellchecking.

As with any spellcheck, if it picks up a word not in its dictionary then it puts a squiggly red line under it. If you right-click the word you will see alternative spellings.

If you do go for a browser extension dictionary, choose a UK English vocabulary. In the USA English vocabulary they make shocking mistakes, like spelling 'color' instead of 'colour', or 'gray' instead of 'grey'. I don't know how they get away with it. :-)

The problem with that is that it only works with textboxes and HTML input fields, and you're not typing into a textbox in DaniWeb.

My fail... I read the thread three times wondering why someone hadn't already mentioned the integrated dictionary... it all seemed so obvious... now I know. :-)

Dumb gets Dumber... my bad again... you did say this earlier in the thread, sorry. I'm gonna shut up now... skimming is no replacement for reading. :-)

LOL no worries. Next time just read LOL.

I find the DW editor a hell of a lot easier than the previous version. If losing spellchecking is the price I have to pay, no contest. The biggest problem, language wise, for me, is poor grammar. I refer to this:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe

I realise that most posters on this thread are referring to their own correct spelling as opposed to trying to decipher other posters' ramblings, but accepted English spelling can differ according to which dictionary you use, highlighting perfectly correct spelling for your region. 2p.

You may find this useful for Chrome:

http://www.grammarly.com/download/chrome

If you highlight your post, right-click and choose spellchecking - you get a popup that inserts the text and parses through it.