Spell Checking and Other Features

[Carl]

I wanted to do what I could to help Pam and our other Moderators. Here's a few of the new features implemented in the forum. I think they'll be appreciated by our crew, and some of them will help others as well.


We have a lot of nonnative English speakers, younger folks, and people who weren't blessed with great spelling skills around here, and up until now, misspellings required a moderator action to correct them. If a user's browser didn't have a built-in spellchecker, as Mozilla's Firefox does, they might not notice little mistakes. Now you'll see a spellchecker button next to post and preview. Use it, and ignore it when you know you've spelled something like Simolean that the checker doesn't recognize. This should make life easier for moderators in general.

So, if you question your spelling, have a look at the spell checker button before you post. It's more powerful than preview and will let you pick the correct word from a list of known spellings. I imagine this will be helpful to a great many of our members.

Many curse words have been completely blocked out. I need mods to let me know of any that slip through so that I can add them to the block list. If you attempted to type a bad word, it would be replaced by asterisks. This is not an excuse for cursing here. It's merely an effort to prevent folks from posting who don't care about our clean, family-friendly nature from getting by with a bad word until a moderator spots it.

Forum searching will now be faster. Rather than query the database to find words, the forum now has a set file that it will look to for messages. I've set it to match whole words only to increase accuracy. This will reduce load when searching and hopefully provide more accurate results.

Additionally, it will now show on the boards whether a member is online or not as you post. If you're expecting a faster response, you can tell who's online in that thread.

Lastly, someone request a jump to page function. While I don't know how to do that exactly, I did find a forum feature that has expanded the available number of pages a member can "leap" to. This should help getting around easier, although it's not exactly what they wanted, it will expedite the process. For those of you who want the ability, there's also an All button which will show 40 posts in a single page, so long as that topic doesn't exceed that amount.

I sent a message to all moderators asking what might help to make their jobs easier. I found these options by scouring the administration area of the forum. It turns out the new server does support spell checking, and the other various features I've enabled today.

When we move to SMF 2.0 we will be able to post images that are uploaded to the forum's server, skipping all the nonsense involved with postimage and our other alternatives.

[Seriphina]

I am so excited about the "All" feature with the pages.  No more clicking the next number after reading a set number of posts, just a beautiful long scroll bar of happiness. 

On a side note, the language filter seems to be a bit on the strong side as it's removing swear words if they are part of another word.  Is there a way to adjust it so that it will pass over actual real and complete words that may include a certain set of three letters quite commonly grouped in our lovely English language?  My choice of wording there was intentional to highlight the issue.   

[Carl]

Thanks for the heads up, it now checks that it's a whole word. As you can see, pass now.. uh, passes

[wildredchild]

Thank you so much Carl for the wonderful new features.  They will make it so much easier for the moderators if members check their spelling before posting.  One less thing for us to worry about. 

You are the best!

[Carl]

Well, this has been a long time coming. I'm interested to hear how happy people are with the current 10 post limit per page as well. We could up that a tad. From a business perspective, page loads help the forum generate revenue to pay for hosting. However, if people would be happier displaying, say, 15 to 20 posts by default, I'd be happy to oblige.

Edit: All will show up to 100 posts. With that, anyone who wants a big dose on any topic smaller than that can get all posts for up to 10 pages. It's not necessary to tweak that setting. In most cases it might increase server load anyway.

[Seriphina]

I'm really happy with the 10 per page for simplicity sake.  If it's something I want to continue browsing through, I have that lovely "All" feature available to me now.  However, most threads are somewhere between 1 and 5 pages anyway, so posts per page being an issue is certainly a thing of the past.   

[Carl]

Thanks for the input. I'm still tweaking. As I edited my post above. I think All will help for most cases where people want more than just the 10. It won't work on topics over 100 messages long, but those are few around here anyway.

[The Illuminator]

I have to say I'm impressed my this, Carl! Especially by the spell checker. I'm also very grateful for the new searching method, for our forum has grown rapidly and finding a particular post was almost impossible. Thank you!

[Slingsby]

I hope this is the right place to post this ....

The Search function seems to be playing up [unless it's me]. 

I was trying to find a post of mine, so I searched for the word "and" posted by "Slingsby" [without the inverted commas] and it came up with not found.  Same with a couple of other search attempts.

[Storyteller]

All I can say is thanks, Carl.  This is awesome.  Also, it was nice getting the little e-mail about the site improvements this morning.  Kudos to you guys for all of your hard work!

BTW:  the spell check is trying to say e-mail is spelled wrong.  It's not.  I guess that most people drop the hyphen.

[tiff_jewels]

I am sure Pam will agree with me when I say do not rely heavily on spell check being the answer to your goals.  I often see books, articles and websites where the authors clearly used spell check but did not review it themselves.  You will often find correctly spelt words in the wrong place or with the wrong definition.  A spell check also will not catch if you have written the same word correctly, twice.

I know this sounds obvious.  If it were indeed this obvious I would not have so many examples to refer to.  I just simply cringe when I see this in purchased items such as a newspaper article.

[tiff_jewels]

Okay,  As you can see in the above post I mentioned my concerns with becoming too reliant upon spell check.  You have posts floating around with problems now that will not be caught by your spell checker.  I know you have a level of standards you wish to keep so I must again mention the need to check some of the posts going out a bit more carefully.

[Pam]

Okay,  As you can see in the above post I mentioned my concerns with becoming too reliant upon spell check.  You have posts floating around with problems now that will not be caught by your spell checker.  I know you have a level of standards you wish to keep so I must again mention the need to check some of the posts going out a bit more carefully.

I'm not sure what your point is with this.  I think we all know that spell check isn't the perfect answer, but it certainly helps.

[Carl]

Right, spell check > no spell check. Mods always watched for grievous typos in posts. Now they have one more screen. It inevitably makes things easier.

[tiff_jewels]

I was under the impression that spelling and grammar were important.  In that light I thought it important to point out that a few posts are going by where the words are technically spelt correctly but were incorrect for the sentence.

As an example, one can write 'I have to glasses of water'.  It is spelt properly even though the sentence should read 'I have two glasses of water'.

These are what I'm seeing of late.  I am attempting to help in the spirit of cooperation.  If I am being perceived as being overhelpful I will be glad to step back.  It would not be the first time I've been a bit too helpful. ;-)