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!
Top comments (59)
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.
Yeah, I like that, that'll probably be much easier to implement!
I started a discussion about this in the moderators channel a few days ago.
This leads to the next suggestion: an indication of who is a moderator.
Great idea!
I suggested something similar here
Should Dev.to posts have a comment section for grammar suggestions?
Davide Bellone ・ Oct 20 ・ 1 min read
Live preview while writing posts. I feel it's really annoying to keep switching back and forth between the editor and the preview.
I think you can create an issue in their github repo about this. This seems pretty useful :D
There's already one open. This is a pretty big and important feature so I think it will take a while.
Give me one day and a constant stream of coffee — I'll get it done.
I’ll donate!
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!
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
I really like the blacklist idea! I see too many React.js posts 🤣
Being able to have the same post in several languages with an easy switch option
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...
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I agree, there needs to be some incentive!
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
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.
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!
I'd love to be able to @ tag other Dev.to users in posts when I mention them 🙋♀️
Can't you do that already? I think I got a notification when I was mentioned in this post.
That would be cool!
Autocomplete for tags, and/or suggested tags.
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:
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.
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.
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
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!
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
Jean-Michel Fayard (fr/en/es/de)
jm_fayard jmfayard
That gives multiple hints
my request for dev.to : display the languages that the user feels comfortable speaking in the user profile. at least as an option.
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.
Maybe change your preferred tags and the bloggers you follow!
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...