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What would you like to see implemented on DEV?

George on June 04, 2019

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 implem...
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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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Ivan

multiple authors for a post :D

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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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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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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)
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Rick Booth

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

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Lautaro Lobo

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

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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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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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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 Halpern

I'm watching this thread closely 👀

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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.
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Nested Software • Edited

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.

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Casey Brooks

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!

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Ben Halpern

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.

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Vincent Grovestine

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.

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Vincent Grovestine

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.)

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Javier Aguirre

I’d like to have more context in the followers list, like how many articles and comments did they publish. Sometimes a lot of people follow you at once and you can’t go one by one opening their profiles to see if they’re active in the community.

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Vincent Dal Maso

I would like to be able to filter out some tags / people from my feed

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Antonio Radovcic • Edited

Something like a Twitter within dev.to, for shorter thoughts, jokes, shoutouts etc.
Without headlines, tags, images etc. Maybe like a chat? Something "live" would be nice.

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Tim Downey

I'm not sure how hard this would be (and maybe there is a way to do it already), but it would be nice to have some liquid tags for embedding a specific commit from Github.