IIRC this has been suggested before and the fear was that the template would remain untouched and new text added at the beginning or at the end. Maybe that could be addressed if the focus was on the textarea and the template text was already selected, so anyone typing without reading will get rid of the template text at once. Other monks suggested to detect whether the template was still there and don't let the author create the node until changed.

In any case, I support this idea because in case the author left the template untouched it will be obvious after posting and hopefully will push the author to edit the node again.

Not having seen the code, I guess that initializing the template would be easy and the change would be easy to back out if it wasn't helpful or caused problems. Thus my inclination would be to try it and see what happens. I can't imagine any great harm if the template remained unedited in a few posts.

Perhaps the template could be removed when the post is created, if it is found to be present without any change. This would deal with the case where the poster ignored the template and inserted new content before or after it. Hopefully they wouldn't start typing at random points within the midst of the template.

change would be easy to back out if it wasn't helpful or caused problems

But we've already tried such experiments with "replace me" templates and they were pretty lousy failures, IMO. I don't see a reason to repeat nearly the same experiment again in hopes that it will turn out drastically different.

Hopefully they wouldn't start typing at random points within the midst of the template.

Um, your template actually calls for them to do that.

BTW, we still have a bit of an experiment running on one "instructions inside templates" idea. If you want to get a tiny taste for how often people post without paying attention to such instructions, just visit this search spec and then submit it. And realize that only users who have a discouraged configuration even get such instructions and that the instructions were such a failure that code had to be added to try to detect when the instructions were not followed.

So many features had to be implemented to work around how badly the "instructions" worked, that I don't believe the instructions have much net impact any longer. And we completely gave up on the hope of getting people to remove the instructions in the template (by turning them into HTML comments so we can just ignore the tons of nodes being posted with the instructions still in place).

- tye