All,
I have noticed a few posts that have made some suggestions about forum enhancements.
As we're migrating and enhancing the site, there may be an opportunity to enhance the forum, as well. Some of the suggestions I have seen are:
If you have any opinions on these or other enhancements/modifications, please post here or email me directly at david.lively@arm.com.
Automatic code snippets detection...?
It's difficult to detect code automatically, but a revised editor could provide a select-and-mark-as-code feature. I use a component that already provides this feature on another site.
Also, moving from HTML to "mark down" language might be a good idea, but I'd like to get some opinions before making any significant changes. The web development rule we're trying to stick to now is "incremental change, and listen to the users."
BB-code and images I wouldn't mind standard BB-code formatting - for example being able to inline an image. Allowing a limited space for logged in users to upload an image would improve the probability that the image will stay available instead of a link pointing out into the big void when someone wants to read the thread three years later.
This of course requires a way to flag and/or edit the post, in case people uploads a copyrighted information.
Threading Right now, people can post answers in the middle of a thread, creating a logical tree structure, but it isn't possible to view the data as a tree. This makes it almost impossible to keep track of new posts when they are made in the middle of the thread. Especially if you get a phone call, resulting in the "new" status to be cleared before you return to your reading.
Either allow tree-like views, or place all new posts at the bottom, but showing a reference to the post number the post was a response to (just make sure that this post number is correct even if a post is erased - or have moderators not erase posts but clear their contents and flagged "content erased by moderator".
"Report a post"
Definitely.
"Edit posts"
This is tricky - it can cause great confusion when a post is edited after replies have already been made...
"Logins"
In view of the increasing amount of SPAM, I think this would now be a good idea.
"question/answer format"
Not sure what you mean by that?
Page width limits Add hard rules for maximum page width. If someone does post a 300 character long source line, the whole thread gets messed up almost completely.
True unicode Not sure, but it seems like this forum may now possibly support Unicode (extra hard to test since the preview seems to just have died - it just shows the post I'm responding to but not the preview of my new post). It has for a long time claimed support, but characters have been destroyed in the process.
This is what the swedish characters a-ring, a-umlaut, o-umlaut looks like on this forum: åäöÅÄÖ I also tested with two cyrillic characters, but then the preview page ended after the parent message, i.e. without showing any preview - and no 'post' button either.
@Per what browser are you using?
Right now IE 8, and the swedish characters came out fine, but it wasn't possible to post data containing cyrillic.
Earlier, the swedish characters always ended up as two-character combos.
Here is an old post with a poster using non-latin characters in his name: http://www.keil.com/forum/docs/thread16171.asp
Here is another: http://www.keil.com/forum/docs/thread15996.asp
A third: http://www.keil.com/forum/docs/thread15797.asp
In this case, the name should have been "Åke"
In these posts, the multi-byte data of UTF8 have somewhere been converted into separate characters.
This problem might have been fixed, with the exception that some unicode characters will stop the processing directly during the post stage.
Try for example to post a U+0416 (Cyrillic capital Zhe) Post button and preview will disappear with both Firefox 3.6.6 or IE 8.
And posting a capital greek omega (U+03A9) will become a capital O: O
Because I suffer greatly from dyslexia of the typing fingers, a spell check in the editor would a great help to me. Bradford
My nun says that decent predictive text is a must.
Awesome.
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions.
Another thing. Sometimes, people manages to post a comment to a old thread. Don't know if it was read-only before, but the thread gets to the top of the list in read-only mode with one fresh comment and impossible for other people to respond to. If read-only, no comment should have been added in the first place.
This is also an interesting thread: http://www.keil.com/forum/docs/thread16629.asp Did show up as having a new comment today 01:06 and in total 3 responses. But when I open the thread, it has only two responses - both very old.
Somehow, there seems to be a locking/update problem, where additions of posts and updates of the thread doesn't get atomically processed.
David Lively,
I hope you realize that once you've updated the forum, you'll get a lot of suggestions (in the form of complaints) about what should and shouldn't be done. Personally, I'm fine with the forum the way it is, and welcome the suggestions above. I'm not fond of the "stackoverflow.com" Q & A style. I'll live with whatever Keil decides to implement. I just want you to realize that any major change and you'll get plenty of whiners and complainers suddenly providing 'suggestions' AFTER you've implemented a forum 'upgrade.' My comment on more colors was just that I thought it would be nice to have a few colors within the code. This way a code fragment can be [copied and] edited to show RED for warning/error and possibly GREEN for Keep/Good/Corrected code. And blue for 'optional' or whatever people decide to do for the various [few] colors provided. Obviously, people like Per and others are regular contributors and their words of wisdom should rate more than most (like me).
--Cpt. Vince Foster 2nd Cannon Place Fort Marcy Park, VA
All changes generate mixed feelings. The question/answer format is a personal preference and is probably too much of a departure from what's been working here for so long, but a lot of the other requests look reasonable and doable.
Thanks for the input.
A "Mark All Threads as 'Read'" button
in the reply 'guide' Place source code source code between < pre > and < /pre >.
should read convert tabs to spaces and Place source code source code between < pre > and < /pre >.
Erik