Re^3: Change of the input form. Proposal

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.

Comment on Re^3: Change of the input form. Proposal

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Re^4: Change of the input form. Proposal (templates) by tye (Sage) on Aug 20, 2009 at 03:28 UTC
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	[reply]
Re^5: Change of the input form. Proposal (templates) by ig (Vicar) on Aug 20, 2009 at 04:26 UTC
Um, your template actually calls for them to do that. But, but, but... not at random points - though given the past experience it sounds like it might as well have told them to do just that. Sorry to hear that it doesn't work. I guess people who don't want to read instructions don't, no matter how they are presented. It's good to know this has been tried - thanks for taking the time to share the experience.	[reply]