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George
George

Posted on

What would you like to see implemented on DEV?

Disclaimer: I am not part of the DEV team

Im constantly seeing Ben and other people on the DEV team opening new issues on GitHub to try and implement features from posts that the community has left. Let's centralise this discussion if possible.

What new features/changes/tweaks and anything else, would you like to see implemented on DEV?

Top comments (31)

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michi profile image
Michael Z

Being able to see posts I ❤️d and 🦄d would be awesome. Right now I am abusing the reading list icon so I can find posts I really enjoyed later again.

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iamschulz profile image
Daniel Schulz

This! Or maybe a Archive list in addition to the reading list.
And while we're at it, a history of comment favs as well :)

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desi profile image
Desi • Edited

There is an archive! Once you read something from your reading list, you can click this guy to “archive” it:
screenshot of the dev.to reading list, with an arrow pointing to the “archive” option

I think it’s a relatively new-ish feature because I don’t remember seeing it before.

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prahladyeri profile image
Prahlad Yeri • Edited
  1. Is there any specific reason for keeping # of followers hidden on people's profiles? (X can see who follows them, but X can't see who follows Y by looking at Y's profile). This is a common feature on networking sites like twitter, quora, etc.
  2. The site appears too large and over-spacious on large monitors, maybe its geared towards only small devices (which isn't a bad thing) but ~16 inch laptops are still common these days!
  3. Its a great thing that you open sourced your code, kudos for that! (Many orgs are moving in the other direction these days).
  4. Markdown is really cool and awesome, most devs love it. Please don't change it by introducing one of those heavy text editors.
  5. However, one positive change you can introduce to the editor is that of shortcuts. For example, selecting a word and pressing ctrl + b (shortcut for bold) should surround the word by **. Similarly, pressing ctrl + i should surround it by a single *, this will be great for productivity!
  6. Maybe its just me but I think the color combination needs a revamp. The green background on "Write a Post" button reminds me of Windows-98! Its a subjective opinion though and I'm not a front-end expert, maybe you guys know better.
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flrnd profile image
Florian Rand • Edited

Being honest, I like how dev.to manages followers and reactions. It's one of the main reasons I finally joined as an active user after being a long time lurker.

Of course it's my personal opinion and my opinion only, but for me this is what makes dev special along with an incredible community.

who cares about who follows whom? I don't, really.

Finally, I like your suggestions about shortcuts!

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prahladyeri profile image
Prahlad Yeri

One of the reasons for caring is it acts like a reputation token on social media (just like "likes" and "upvotes" do). For example, I'd take an author with 10K followers far more seriously than someone with just 10 followers simply because of the reputation factor.

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georgecoldham profile image
George

One of the great things about DEV imo is the ability for anyone to get equal view times regardless of popularity. I wouldn’t mind seeing followers for this reason, as long as it doesn’t effect how posts are presented to us.

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flrnd profile image
Florian Rand

Well, I respect your point of view @prahladyeri , I think this would be a good debate but for another thread!

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pinguxx profile image
Ivan

multiple authors for a post :D

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peter profile image
Peter Kim Frank

Excited to follow along this thread. @georgecoldham , I would suggest adding the #meta tag as well.

My small on-topic contribution is that I'd like @-mentioning to utilize a drop-down (maybe prioritizing people in this thread, similar to GitHub) to make comments like this a bit easier :)

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kayis profile image
K

Would be cool to see where my viewers came from.

I have some articles with >10k views, but no way to tell what led to them

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

On the way

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lautarolobo profile image
Lautaro Lobo

Yes, some more analytics may be good, but you can argue that Dev.to is not trying to make CEO a big part of this. Just sharing stuff... Am I clear?

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georgecoldham profile image
George

Personally, I would like to see:

  • A subscribed user feed, to see post from users I follow, separate from the general main feed(s)
  • Refinements on the iOS app, the navigation specifically
  • A differentiation between ❤️ and 🦄, what that is... I have no idea
  • The ability to see other posts code in the editor, A good way to learn how to layout your own posts
  • The ability to easily tag users inline (eg. @ben instead of {%user ben%} which gives a banner)
ben image
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rixcy profile image
Rick Booth

Unicorns are just super likes, because they're awesome ;)

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lautarolobo profile image
Lautaro Lobo

Like a Fav button, but we are missing then, I think, the Unicorned posts list.

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glennmen profile image
Glenn Carremans

I am able to tag people with @
For example in this post of mine:

@ben can you explain how this works exactly

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georgecoldham profile image
George

Huh, I didn’t see that in the docs when looking for it. Good to know it exists!

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jhuebel profile image
Jason Huebel • Edited

Most of my "wants" are layout-related.

First, I appreciate the minimalist look to the site, but it could use some whitespace tweaks. There's a lack of consistency, especially vertical vs horizontal whitespace. Things look crowded vertically (because of less whitespace), which is harder on the reader.

Second, everything being black-on-white with small solid borders doesn't lend itself to easily understanding where various features are on a page.

Third, I see two fields in my profile for colors-- background color and text color. I don't know what those are for.

Finally, dark mode. Really not enjoyable to use. It has all the same problems the light mode has with whitespace and boxes, plus a few more.

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jmplourde profile image
Jean-Michel Plourde • Edited
  • When I am on an article, I'd like to be able to save the article. Right now when I click on an article from outside of the website (twitter, fb, etc.) I can't save it and if I go back to the main page, I will lose it.

  • When I'm finished with reading an article from my saved list, I just want to get rid of it. Right now you click archive, you still have the count besides the list and it annoys me. I have like 40+ saved article. I want to know the number of articles I have left to read, not the number of every one saved ever.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I'm watching this thread closely 👀

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ryansmith profile image
Ryan Smith • Edited
  • Weighted tags or an improved classification system for posts would be a good feature. If you go to the JavaScript tag now and view the top posts from infinity, many are not JavaScript-specific posts. I'm not throwing shade on these posts, as they are well-written and popular posts, I'm just saying some are general purpose programming posts with a loose relation to JavaScript. I would find improvements to tags useful in order to see what the hot topics in JavaScript are this week, month, year.
  • A "rising" feed link to showcase new posts that gaining attention (through views, likes, comments, etc.). I think this would be useful to get into a topic earlier and contribute. It would also help if you are finding the main feed a little stale because you refresh DEV too much.