Overall, I’m liking the new forum for Connect (similar style to the excellent stackoverflow family of sites), but here are a few of the things I’d like to see:
- Better code identification - I have a feeling that a lot of code will get shared in these forums and it’s not immediately apparent on how to format “code” in a question. So far, it looks like everyone is just doing their own thing (vs the old forum [code] tags). I see that question2answer does support some code styling addons. Maybe adding one would be useful? (Markdown would be cool too!)
- Full editing in comments - if I “answer” a question, I get the full editor, but if I “comment” on a question, it’s a simple text box. Going back and forth in a discussion, I’d see the need for the full editor, otherwise new “answers” get created and the Q&A paradigm gets somewhat broken. (Again I’m taking design queues from stackoverflow)
- Wider body area - it’s not too bad, but I’d like to see it a bit wider. By the time comments are made in line, an active discussion could be a long scroll with ever decreasing size of internal comments. It’s nice to strike a balance in information density; clean, but still efficient. To be fair, I have this complaint about the design of a lot of sites these days. Big fonts, bigger buttons, lots of whitespace and lots of scrolling to get the info I need… I blame tablets!
Just my two cents…