Is it OK if we have a feature-request thread here?

[backscatter712]

For this thread, toss aside all the usual political/moderation related questions about who should be banned, what the rules should be, etc.

This thread would be for technical feature requests for the forums.

For example, one request I'd make:

Enable Youtube or video embedding in regular threads and replies to posts. Right now, the only way to post videos is through the Political Videos forum, which is awkward.

Granted, some may argue that allowing videos in regular threads would be obnoxious - it'd hog bandwidth for dial-up users (OK, that justifies an option in the preferences to turn video-embedding off...)

Another feature that would be really cool would be a better post editor - right now, it's all plain-text, with manually embedded codes. Not hard for a gearhead like me, but it slows me down, and for non-technical users, it's very obnoxious. A WYSIWYG editor, or at least an editor with buttons for bolding text, embedding images, that sort of thing, would be awesome.

Those are the features I'd like to see off the top of my head. I understand if implementing them is not realistic, or would take a long time, but I think it would be good for users to make feature requests, and since we have the Ask The Admins forum, give the admins a chance to explain "This feature is incredibly easy, we'll do it tomorrow." or "This feature is insanely difficult, would cause lots of problems, and we've got too many things on our plate to implement it." (If that's the case, I understand.)

Well, I guess the last thing to point out is that putting new features on the boards requires a potentially huuuuge amount of time on the part of Elad and the other admins with technical prowess, so I've gotta give a shout-out to them. :toast:

[Skinner]

1. I'll ask Elad if he thinks this would be worth doing.

FWIW, I rather like dealing with each request as they come in, in a different thread. But Elad might feel differently.

As for the requests:

Embedding YouTube videos: We might do it. But we worry that people would stop using our Political Videos forum if we did. It is nice to have all the videos in one place, I think.

WYSIWYG editor: I tend to think this would be difficult. Unless there's a plug-in or something that might work.

[backscatter712]

2. Thanks, I appreciate the response.

As far as the editor goes, how about some enhancements that go short of going full-WYSIWYG?

Say a row of buttons for bold, italics, add-link, add-image, other things, that are hooked up to some Javascript that just adds the appropriate square-bracket tags at the cursor location, or around the selected text, or whatever's appropriate for a particular function? I've seen that kind of editor at lots of different forums, so maybe there is a plug-in or software module around that already implements this and can be hacked into DU easily.

Sounds to me like it would be easier to do than full WYSIWYG, and would make things easier for the non-computer-geeks that use DU (which I'd guess is the vast majority here.)