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Luke Garrigan
Luke Garrigan

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

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 mode where certain people can read your blog and fix any spelling/grammar mistakes you may have made.

This would really help non-native English speakers get their point across and also help them in learning the language at the same time. I've seen too many brilliant blogs not getting the traction they deserve just because their English isn't the best.

Maybe add badges or some kind of incentive to get people to actually bother!

Your thoughts

I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this and also hear some features you'd love to see on the website!

Oldest comments (59)

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snj profile image
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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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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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan

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

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sesamestrong profile image
Sesamestrong

Great idea!

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nickytonline profile image
Nick Taylor

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

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

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

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bellonedavide profile image
Davide Bellone
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marcellothearcane profile image
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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rohit profile image
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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lukegarrigan profile image
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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saurabhdaware profile image
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 profile image
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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evanroggenkamp profile image
Evan Roggenkamp

I’ll donate!

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hoangleitvn profile image
Hoang Le

That would be really really helpful for people like me

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link2twenty profile image
Andrew Bone

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

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somedood profile image
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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craigmc08 profile image
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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fidelve profile image
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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lukegarrigan profile image
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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_bigblind profile image
Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers

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

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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan

quick PR, no prob.

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matthias profile image
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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chloecondon profile image
Chloe Condon 🎀

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

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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan

That would be cool!

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avalander profile image
Avalander

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

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vishal_codes profile image
Vishal Prajapati

Dark mode....

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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan • Edited

Check out Style Customization!

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evanroggenkamp profile image
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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lukegarrigan profile image
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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rrodriguze profile image
Roberto Rodríguez

Definitely some native mobile apps!!!

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alebian profile image
Alejandro Bezdjian

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

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mateuszjarzyna profile image
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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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan

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