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What do you think the BEST feature is that dev.to could add?

Luke Garrigan on November 10, 2019

A feature I'd like to see I think an optional spellcheck/grammar setting would be amazing. Pre-release of a blog it'll go into a special...
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marcellothearcane profile image
marcellothearcane

Suggesting edits. Similar to the Quora model, where you curate the edits on your posts.

That would let native English speakers help out non-native speakers too.

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Luke Garrigan

Yeah, I like that, that'll probably be much easier to implement!

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Nick Taylor

I started a discussion about this in the moderators channel a few days ago.

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Ben Sinclair

This leads to the next suggestion: an indication of who is a moderator.

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Sesamestrong

Great idea!

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bellonedavide profile image
Davide Bellone
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Rohit Awate

Live preview while writing posts. I feel it's really annoying to keep switching back and forth between the editor and the preview.

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Saurabh Daware 🌻

I think you can create an issue in their github repo about this. This seems pretty useful :D

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Rohit Awate

There's already one open. This is a pretty big and important feature so I think it will take a while.

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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan

Give me one day and a constant stream of coffee — I'll get it done.

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Evan Roggenkamp

I’ll donate!

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Luke Garrigan

ahh yes, this is one I've thought about too when writing blogs. I write a sentence, preview, write a sentence, preview. I'd probably write the blog at twice the speed if this was a feature!

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Mateusz Jarzyna

I can see two missing features:
1) black list. For example I'm following the #productivity tag, but as I'm macos user I don't want to read posts tagged with #windows because I'm totally not interested in window's programs.

2) add-comment-form at the bottom of comments sections

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Luke Garrigan

I really like the blacklist idea! I see too many React.js posts 🤣

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Andrew Bone

Being able to have the same post in several languages with an easy switch option

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Basti Ortiz

In theory, this is a really great feature that I totally agree with. However, given the current state of online language translators (such as Google Translate), it must be pointed out that it may prove to be difficult—or even cumbersome—to even attempt to translate some technical programming jargon to other languages. I fear that the state of being "lost in translation" may cause even more confusion.

But then again, some level of translation is at least better than none, right? I mean I hope so...

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Craig McIlwrath

Maybe just the ability to write (manually) the article in more than one language, and the correct one for the reader's language preference is chosen automatically, if it exists.

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somedood profile image
Basti Ortiz • Edited

Ah, in this case, I believe this is doable. A manual language setting—perhaps in the front matter—may prove to be ideal if the author wants to explicitly denote the language of the article.

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Nic

A really helpful feature, it meets my needs exactly.
Grammarly can help to some extent for spellcheck and grammar checking.

It will be better If there is a strategy that encourages readers to improve the article.

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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan

It will be better If there is a strategy that encourages readers to improve the article.

Yeah I agree, there needs to be some incentive!

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Evan Roggenkamp

I’d like to be able to save articles to various collections of some sort. There’s some VERY valuable information in a lot of articles here and it would be excellent to be able to reference them later without having to export them to google keep or other mediums.

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Luke Garrigan

Yeah I like this, at the moment I just use my reading list for blogs I want to keep. But yeah, ability to organise them would be cool!

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Matei Adriel

Same + too many articles covering things which the internet is full with (eg: introduction to react hooks / async await / other generic stuff), or articles which are basically just rephrasings of the readmes

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marcellothearcane

Autocomplete for tags, and/or suggested tags.

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Chloe Condon 🎀

I'd love to be able to @ tag other Dev.to users in posts when I mention them 🙋‍♀️

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Avalander

Can't you do that already? I think I got a notification when I was mentioned in this post.

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Luke Garrigan

That would be cool!

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Ben Sinclair

I've mentioned this before somewhere, but heavily programmer-focused custom filters.

I would like to set [my default view] to be posts on [topics from this list] excluding [topics on this other list] including one or more matches to /this pattern/ and excluding matches to /this other pattern/ ordered by [most-recent], and I'd like other people to be able to subscribe to this filter:

view-name: Cool javascript
topics-in: javascript,
topics-out: node
advanced-filter-in: title:/cool|fancy|exciting|new/
advanced-filter-out: body:/jquery|mootools|prototype/i 
order: date DESC
share: true
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FidelVe

I'm a non-native English speaker, and currently, I'm using the Grammarly Chrome extension for grammar checking, I totally recommend it.

In terms of features, I think it would be nice to add a link to the articles that earned a badge, right now you can see your badges (an others) but it would be nice if you could click on a badge and it would redirect you to the specific article that earned you that badge.

I was also taking a quick look at the API, and I was thinking that it would be great to have the option to obtain things like a list of who is following a specific user, and who is that user following.

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Luke Garrigan

I'm English and use Grammarly too, I still make mistakes that Grammarly doesn't pick up on 😔 but yeah, I recommend it too!

I'm unsure about the following/follower API — they're hidden in the UI so I suppose they have their reasons for it.

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Chris

I really want the ability to filter the feed by post read time. I don't want to have to scroll past twenty 1min read posts to find actual content

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Luke Garrigan

Yeah that'd be really good, especially if you've got X amount of minutes free - good to be able to quickly find articles that you have enough time to read!

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Mark Davies

It's very rare that I see anything on dev.to that I would consider "advanced knowledge", most of the stuff I read on this site is beginner, maybe breaching into intermediate.

This is not a bad thing - it makes for a very inclusive community, and if I want a quick introduction to something I know where to look! I just wouldn't use this website for anything more than what it seems to be.

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

I care deeply about the multi language issue as a polyglot living in this modern tower of Babel called Berlin, Germany.

On my profile, I show which languages I speak well enough

jmfayard image

That gives multiple hints

  • my mother tongue is not English so please be kind
  • if your mother tongue is for example Spanish, please don't be afraid to DM me in Spanish with the chat feature

my request for dev.to : display the languages that the user feels comfortable speaking in the user profile. at least as an option.

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Trynix

No offence to webdevs , but my dev.to feed is 23/25 articles just related to Js/webdev, despite me not following any of those relevant topics.

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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan

Maybe change your preferred tags and the bloggers you follow!

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marcellothearcane

Also, a zen-mode mobile editor, with nothing except the text box (which scrolls rather than disappearing behind the keyboard!)

Chrome on Android, if anyone wants to debug...

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Paula Santamaría

That would be a really useful feature!

I'd also like to be notified when people embed one of my articles in theirs: Once I discover someone sharing my article and it was awesome. And, also, I sometimes share other people's articles and I'd like the authors to know.

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Chloe Condon 🎀

Also, links automatically opening into another tab. Often, folks use DevTo as documentation/ref, and it's rare I want to leave the page from another link.

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Luke Garrigan

I have a habit of automatically clicking the middle mouse button for links, but I can see how this might be an issue!

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Marko Shiva

That is similar to the way the quora and stackoverflow do and yes the mods that do language and grammar checks could be useful.
Also having a badge for that activity would help.

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Alejandro Bezdjian

It would be nice to sort and filter posts (by reactions, views, etc) while searching

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Roberto Rodríguez

Definitely some native mobile apps!!!

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lbonanomi

There's already an "Experience Level of Post" setting under management, I'd be grateful if that were a displayed/filter-able category.

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Aashir Khan

I want Dev to prevent user from giving reactions to their own post.

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Luke Garrigan

Really? Got to give your post a kickstart 🤣

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Aashir Khan

If everyone is doing it then??

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Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers

A computer-brain interface, so I can ingest all the info more quickly.

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Luke Garrigan

quick PR, no prob.

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Matthias 🤖

I would love to see a better Follower tab in my dashboard.

I think it would be nice to search and / or filter the list to better interact with users who follow yourself.

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Hoang Le

That would be really really helpful for people like me

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Michiel Hendriks

Public reading/watching/listening list on user profiles. So a page where people can publicly list which books/articles/etc. they are reading/have read/are going to read.

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Luke Garrigan

oooh maybe an integration with goodreads.com!

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Yechiel Kalmenson • Edited

A pronoun field in the bio settings.

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Vishal Prajapati

Dark mode....

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Luke Garrigan • Edited

Check out Style Customization!

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Tuna Çağlar Gümüş

"Maybe add badges or some kind of incentive to get people to actually bother!".
There is already a badge system. Maybe they should show it next to the username?

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Luke Garrigan

I know there's already a badge system, I just mean add a badge for someone who has editing X amount of blogs!

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Jose Luis Ramos T.

Interfaz oscura