I’ve used regular templates for things and while I find the feature more useful than not having a template, the resulting formatting always looks off because it’s not clear how to enter the data.[1] So having a custom form is great!
Feedback:
I really miss having links. (And to a lesser degree, Markdown formatting.) If people don’t know what an option means, it would be handy to point them at the documentation.[I believe this and the next point are addressed by Introducing Form Templates - #64 by Tris20]I’d like to have a way to add instructions or an introduction. Ideally with links.
- The title of the post and tags seem to be part of the form. It’s awkward that we can’t customize the prompt. In this form, I’d like the proposed group name to be the title, but it’s not clear how to signal that to users so I added a redundant field:
- In the same vein, it’d be interesting to include some way to prompt people to use specific tags. For instance, a support system might use tags to help triage a ticket. The form could include a dropdown with the relevant tags and automatically apply it to the topic. Maybe the same thing with categories too.
- It’s not immediately obvious that the
multi-selectallows more than one choice. You need to know to use Control or Shift to select more than one, from what I can tell. - It’d be neat if checkboxes where represented as checkboxes[2] in the resulting post:
Is the box checked?
- Trying to submit a blank form does nothing and doesn’t show an error. (In fairness, I could add a validation or two to fix this.)
On the whole, this feature really does check a lot of boxes[3] for my purposes. (I’m working on a way for people to propose new groups on my community-building platform.)
The Ask Wizard on Stack Overflow started life as a very crude tamplate. My experience with that colors the way I look at this feature in general. I’ve also used the current Discourse template system for an essay feedback system. ↩︎
At the moment it’s a heading with either “on” if the box is checked. ↩︎
Heh! ↩︎