Camen Design Forum

The SUBMIT button scares me.

append delete Neolander

Hi,

After some time spent using NNF, the "SUBMIT" button still feels extremely scary to me, like an irreversible and unforgiving action. It could be an intended behaviour, but if not here's why.

On most written supports, I write things as the thought comes, then read them more carefully in the middle of the rest and edit/correct if needed. However, it has been made pretty clear by Kroc that no edit function will come to NNF. I still think that the invoked reason was pretty weak, but a no is a no, so I had to think how I can bring myself to do without my editing addiction. Appending simply isn't enough, while copy+delete+scroll+paste+type+post is quite complicated, dirty, and does not work so well in a number of situations.

I've then thought that this could be an occasion to finally try and drop my hot-blooded writing habits, and learn to proofread things *before* I submit them. It would solve a number of problem, like people who have seen the old version and replied to it before I edited some major changes in it.

What do you think about it : should post preview come to NNF ?

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append delete #1. Kroc

http://camendesign.com/ode_to_textarea

It’s a client problem, not an NNF one. No one can click that button but you. If you weren’t ready, your problem. I’m not here to nanny users on how to use a button.

What you type is what you get. NNFs markup syntax is designed to not need previewing. You will get what you expect to get, and it will copy and paste back to the same text it came from. There is no black box that will munge your text to fear here, only your browser.

You could copy the page's text into your favourite text editor and edit it there. What’s stopping anybody doing this? Should I have to code such a feature into NNF; ask all the text-editors to provide a browser plugin so I can add twenty buttons to NNF for "edit in x". Of course not, this isn’t like those annoying share buttons. :)

You have got to let go of this notion that we have to preview everything before we commit it to the computer, that is bad design. That is a messed up system that beats users into complete fear and distrust of the computer to the point that they can’t write text online without the comfort of a preview to show them the same damn thing they just typed back to them!

I’m interested in everybody else’s reasoning either way about this subject as a general "forum-design" topic, but not ever is NNF going to get a preview. If it does, it will have outright failed its objectives.

Perhaps we should change the wording? :P I don’t like "submit", it's too scary looking.

append delete #2. Neolander

Crazy idea of the day : if that's your goal couldn't NNF have some WYSIWYG feature where an editable "blank post", that looks exactly the same as all others save for the extra login fields, is simply located at the end of all posts from a given topic, with HTML code being generated on the fly as the users clicks the blank post and starts to type ?

append delete #3. Kroc

Yes :) In a perfect Internet that would probably be the case; but I am _way_ too lazy to code that much shite :P That is some seriously unpleasant coding there. Cross browser WYSIWYG? The code would 10x the size of the rest of NNF.

append delete #4. Neolander

Ah... Just forgot for a second that web technologies were initially created to publish books with hyperlinks on the inside and thought that they provided a worthwile cross-OS API :)

append delete #5. Wannes

I have no issues with the 'submit' button as-is. The expand button in the corner of the text area is everything I need, if I would type longer text and try to reread my writings before submitting them.

Post-preview is something that would make the people not read before they post, it's like that xkcd comic http://xkcd.com/481/ . Because of the fact that I continually reread my post, I mostly don't even post it, since it's not really contributing to the discussion. A positive effect, considering the goals of this forum.

append delete #6. Martijn

“[Kroc:] ask all the text-editors to provide a browser plugin so I can add twenty buttons to NNF for “edit in x”.”

There are lots of options for this:
 • Firefox: It’s All Text! (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/its-all-text/)
 • Safari: Saft (http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft/index.html)
 • Chrome: 1) Edit with Emacs (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ljobjlafonikaiipfkggjbhkghgicgoh) and 2) TextareaConnect (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ooddekcmdpjicehjkgobdopbkgepmahj)

“[Wannes:] Post-preview is something that would make the people not read before they post […] I continually reread my post, I mostly don’t even post it, since it's not really contributing to the discussion.”

I’d like to argue previewing can help keep off-topic contributions away in exactly the way you mention. But only when it’s mandatory previewing.

I’ve seen some sites to this. In order to post anything you have to go through a preview first. This makes sure people see what they are posting before they post it and the idea behind it is for people to reread (or proofread) their copy one last time before putting it out there.

However good mandatory previewing might be, I will never want it to be part of forum software. Unless all topics turn into long form game ideas and “meditative topic”s it will only hinder the flow of information, especially for those who just want to leave a comment. People will simply learn not to reread and the effect will be negated.

“[Neolander:] HTML code being generated on the fly as the users clicks the blank post and starts to type?”

While good in theory there is no good way to do this. First there is the problem of not being able to style text and keep it editable in HTML. Many of the known WYSIWYG systems work around this by capturing your cursor position, keeping your actual typed text in a hidden textarea and display an iframe of generated HTML. Even though what this forum would use doesn’t even get close to the functionality they are offering the rendering system is the same crappy work-around.

If you just want to generate a live preview away from the message box (essentially showing everything that is written twice) this would be easier—not easy!—but also quite hindering. The browser will trigger redraws of the page all the time and your scrollbar is going to do little dances. Another problem with this is the parser Kroc wrote. Regular Expressions in Javascript aren’t documented very well. There are limitations, unsupported classes and references and even browser differences. To do the live parsing we would need AJAX that sends raw text to the server and retrieves the HTML output, eating bandwidth for every update.

“[Kroc:] Perhaps we should change the wording? :P I don’t like “submit”, it’s too scary looking.”

Maybe “Put this out there!” will get people thinking? :D

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