CodeGuru Submission Process

Hi Everybody - I hope everyone is having a great holiday season. The new year is fast approaching and we want to make CodeGuru the best community for developers in 2011 and beyond. We are committed to making the user experience here simpler and just plain better. A big part of that is code and article submissions. I've heard from a few people that one obstacle to article submissions is the CodeGuru submission process itself. Well here's our opportunity to fix it.

We need your valuable feedback to make the submission process easy and more usable.If you think there is a way to simplify the process please, let's hear it. Thank you as always.

Seems like a few people can't figure out how to FORMAT their code, but don't remember any problems when I posted my article.

WYSIWYG editor for the actual article.

Thanks guys for the feedback. Hopefully we'll get some more.

I don't have a problem with the submission process, it's better than it used to be (except for the tagging control with auto suggestion which is a pain to use). I am completely unhappy, I've said it before, and I will not rest saying it ( ;) ) with the format of the articles, especially these:

• a very narrow column of text (barely uses half of my screen),
• a extremely bad background for the code (looks like a math notebook page),
• hard to read selection (just a light blue text, no background color).

You MUST change that!

Here are my remarks/suggestions. Sorry if I repeat some already posted.

For submit page:

1. The vertical scrollbar of "Categories" field is not visible until horizontal scrolling. That's quite annoying for anybody and hard to find for one submitting for the first time.
2. When pushing a question mark button, "Submission Guidelines" page is open in the same window. Further, you must go back and eventually may lose something. I think, it's better to be open by default in a new window.
3. A context help would be useful. E.g. if push the question mark beside "General info" group, only the guidelines for this gorup to be shown.
4. "Article tags/define tags" field freezes while typing in it. Probably, it's trying to search some suggestion(s) but fially, suggests nothing. :)
5. "Related Article" is missing in the guidelines. Probably, there are also others missing. Has to be reviewed.
6. Would be nice to get rid of ads, at least in the article submit page to make the submission process faster and easier.
7. There is too much unused space in the left and right side of the page.

For article pages:

1. Sometimes, selecting a category is a pain. The menu is not fully usable until all page items are loaded and sometimes this takes long time.
2. A filter for searching "only in CG articles" would be great.
3. Too small dimensions allowed for images. Even pictures having reasonable dimensions are shrinked then look ugly.
4. Some source code fields appear with vertical scrollbar, even they have one or two lines.
5. Auto syntax coloring would be a wonderful improvement.
6. Last but not the least. There is too much unused space in the left and right side of the page. It's a wonderful color, all may look great for an "artist" but makes the effective page too narrow. As a consequence (which I really don't like), most of source code fields have horizontal scrollbars even for reasonable line lengths.
   // Come on, guys! Punch cards and text displays with 80 columns are not used anymore... :D