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)
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.
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 :)
There is an archive! Once you read something from your reading list, you can click this guy to “archive” it:
I think it’s a relatively new-ish feature because I don’t remember seeing it before.
Markdownis really cool and awesome, most devs love it. Please don't change it by introducing one of those heavy text editors.ctrl + b(shortcut for bold) should surround the word by**. Similarly, pressingctrl + ishould surround it by a single*, this will be great for productivity!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!
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.
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.
Well, I respect your point of view @prahladyeri , I think this would be a good debate but for another thread!
Excited to follow along this thread. @georgecoldham , I would suggest adding the
#metatag 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 :)
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
On the way
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?
multiple authors for a post :D
Personally, I would like to see:
{%user ben%}which gives a banner)Ben Halpern
Unicorns are just super likes, because they're awesome ;)
Like a Fav button, but we are missing then, I think, the Unicorned posts list.
I am able to tag people with
@For example in this post of mine:
16 Week Streak 🎉 + What online poll tool do you use? 🤔
Glenn Carremans ・ 2 min read
@ben can you explain how this works exactly
Huh, I didn’t see that in the docs when looking for it. Good to know it exists!
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.
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.
I'm watching this thread closely 👀
I have a couple of usability issues I've been thinking of reporting in github.
When creating/editing an article, on desktop, the "download image" icon is at the bottom of the screen. When you click it, you then have to scroll to the top again to select an image.
I've also noticed that if I edit or delete something, the update isn't propagated everywhere across the site. My impression is that there are separate documents behind the scenes that store the same information, depending on where it is displayed. In particular, deleting something, such as a comment, can take several days. If you click on it or try to interact with it in some way, it will send you to a 404 page, but it's still visible for quite a while. I have a feeling that there is a background process responsible for updating this stuff, but it does seem to be rather slow. I haven't seen this kind of thing on other sites. I don't know how high priority it is, but it would be nice if it were possible for the updates to be more immediate from the user's point of view.
In terms of new features, I'd really like to have more control over the profile page, though I don't have a clear sense of exactly what changes I'd ask for. In general, I'd like to have more control of what is displayed and in what order. I think dev.to has an opportunity with the profile page to create kind of a central calling card for developers, where developers could use it as their main profile for resumes/job applications.
Just cracked open the post editor yesterday to find my biggest annoyance fixed: having the save button always visible. Used to have to scroll to the top of the editor to save (really annoying for long articles).
Nothing else comes to mind for me!
I've been thinking just today about how I'd love to extend our notifications area to ingest some of my notifications from other services.
I have a hard time keeping up with relevant GitHub convos, progress in our CI suite, etc. I could definitely see some value to aggregate that stuff on DEV. I'm literally speaking from my own personal preferences as someone who hangs out here all the time, but I generally think it could be a good idea.
While "My Tags" and the auto-generated top-100 tags lists are handy, it'd be great to have a list of all tags ever used since the beginning of time. The top-100 list probably covers 99% of topics, but sometimes you want to read (or post) about a truly obscure or underrepresented subject.
Maybe I'm showing my age being a geek of the '90s, but an IRC-like chat feature has been on my "fingers-crossed that the Dev team are mind-readers and will roll this out automagically" wishlist for quite a while.
Heck, it was only this morning due to an accidental click that I discovered the paper airplane icon in the top navigation bar leads to a direct messaging client! ;)
While the current messaging system is a nice perk, the necessity of mutual follow-back limits who one can talk with at any given time. Arguably, it is a barrier to organic conversation between folk, especially those who might not normally DM a stranger (lurkers, online introverts, deep listeners, etc.)