I think it could be handy to have the possibility of defining some templates for messages, either fixed and equal for all, or personalisable.
I've noticed that a little effort in this direction has already been done: in the Message Inbox there's the note:
To help someone by giving Writeup Formatting Tips, link to it by including [id://17558] in your message.This approach could go a little beyond, like letting the user preselect a template message and fill-in other info, if necessary. A couple of useful templates could be:
- please add code tags, see [id://17558]
- please retitle to "", see [id://17558]
If this proposal is found interesting, I'd also propose to work in "append mode", i.e. append the template to the current message. This would save the useful feature of messaging the OP directly from one of their nodes (which inserts a link to the node directly into the message).
Flavio
perl -ple'$_=reverse' <<
It's a cool idea. For the "personal use only" option, you can almost certainly do what you're proposing via the Free Nodelet.
Please see [id://492700], and in particular, the three threads linked there, which not only explain how the Free Nodelet works, but present numerous examples.
Personally, my Free Nodelet includes the following bit of code. You could start with this.
But the suggestion still stands: it would be helpful to have such a templating feature, so that it is available to all "off the shelf". Anyway... thanks!
Flavio
perl -ple'$_=reverse' <<
It would be great if the message composer had a row of handy 'fill in' buttons for things like linking to other nodes, other monks, the usual text modes and special characters. This is the web after all?
Nonetheless, I'm taking a look to the editor, thanks!
Flavio
perl -ple'$_=reverse' <<
The real advantage in such a feature (at least for the templates I suggested) would be that many considerations could be avoided
I highly doubt that. There have certainly been many monks who have had multiple nodes considered for the same fairly simple problems and have had several private /msgs regarding the problem sent to them but still manage to produce nodes with the same problem for quite a while. Many nodes would also still get considered simply because the author doesn't happen to be around soon enough after the problem is /msg'd to them.
Worse, I don't think "have everyone send a private /msg instead of considering" scales at all well. Perhaps you plan to implement the "delete all 200 private messages I got that tell me to add READMORE tags for this particular node" feature? :) Sending a private /msg instead of considering is often a good idea. But there is a balance to be struck.
- tye
Flavio
perl -ple'$_=reverse' <<