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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!

Top comments (59)

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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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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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sesamestrong profile image
Sesamestrong

Great idea!

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bellonedavide profile image
Davide Bellone
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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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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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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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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 🤣

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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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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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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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mateiadrielrafael profile image
Matei Adriel

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

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marcellothearcane profile image
marcellothearcane

Autocomplete for tags, and/or suggested tags.

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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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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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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan

That would be cool!

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

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:

view-name: Cool javascript
topics-in: javascript,
topics-out: node
advanced-filter-in: title:/cool|fancy|exciting|new/
advanced-filter-out: body:/jquery|mootools|prototype/i 
order: date DESC
share: true