I have the impression that this happens because it is more difficult to notice in rich text mode that after you remove the text, there is still some formatting.
At least, I haven’t only noticed topics that begin with quotes before the feature was added.
So maybe it makes sense to adjust the template to prevent this.
That’s an interesting theory! I’m going to just remove the category template for now. Maybe we can find a better, less cumbersome way to educate new members to use search before posting.
@chapoi and I were also talking in chat this week about updating the support category description, which currently reads like this:
The first part shows up on the support category banner, and is not very informative.
If this successfully reduces the number of topics with quotes at the beginning, it might be necessary to also remove this from all the buttons to create support topics in the topics of official plugins, themes, and components.
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. Those buttons are gorgeous and I love them, but they are hard to maintain and error prone when you need to make a change or create a new one.
For the long run we’ll want to edit those topics and remove those buttons. We may also want to make more adjustments there so I will hold off on touching them for now.
So far I am not noticing any more quotes at the top of support requests which is good.
Before we throw away the baby with the bathwater, wouldn’t it be a good idea to have the ability to override the placeholder in the composer via a parameterized link instead of inserting actual text content. We’re now misusing the body parameter.
Something like &placeholder=foo which would then overwrite the “Type here. Use markdown, BBCode or HTML to format.” placeholder with “foo”.
Didn’t the category template for Support do exactly the same? It’s also adding text to the body. Isn’t that the reason why there is a watched word that made it more difficult for me to post the OP containing the template? When you create a new topic in Marketplace the body is also filled with text. So I had the impression the body text was part of the link to ensure the template was visible in this case too.
I still think it makes sense to have the same result in the body if you’re using the new topic button and if you’re clicking one of the buttons on an official theme or plugin.
In general it would probably be easier if these buttons manually entered into all the official topics were created automatically. Then mistakes in the tags couldn’t happen and they could be updated way easier. But that’s probably difficult because they don’t all work the same. Data explorer suggests to ask in Data & reporting, the sso plugins tell you to ask for help in SSO instead of Support.
This sounds pretty much exactly like what Richard is proposing. I think it’s a good idea because it disappears when you start typing and doesn’t cause stray instructions to end up in topics. We could also then remove the watched word.
Agreed. Will keep this in mind for future changes we might like to make.
I think it depends on the use case. It works well for a short template like the one that was used in support, but I think for longer templates like in Marketplace it wouldn’t be that helpful if the template disappeared once you enter the first character. For me, the text in the body in marketplace topics is a good compromise between a placeholder that disappears when you start typing and a template with fixed fields like the form-templates offer.
Though I wonder if telling users to search every time they create a topic makes a difference. Do people really read that every time they create a topic?
Telling users to search is something I’d more likely tell them the first times they are posting. For example, in the jit composer message shown on the first few topics you create. “Please search” is kind of like “please chose a meaningful title”.
Yeah, in this case for the support category I am happy trying for a period to have no nudge at all. If we see an uptick in people obviously asking questions before searching, we can look to solutions then.
at the upper right to search.
