New Forum Features!

The forum is a place that will be ultimately shaped by you, the community, but we wanted to make sure it is a friendly place from the start, and functional in the way you want. One of the aspects of most forums that I personally find frustrating is the need to read through an entire thread to find a solution buried somewhere in the thread… or multiple solutions peppered throughout. While I don’t think that all of these topics will have binary (true or false) solutions, many of them will. As of today, we added our first 2 plugins to this Discourse Forum:

  1. Solved - when you post a topic, you, and only you, are given the power to mark your topic/question as solved. It looks like this:
    Options at the bottom of the post ----------->03%20AM
    Check the box to mark as solved18%20AM
    Then the very first post on the topic gets a snippet and link to the solution:
    29%20AM
    Lastly, the topics now shows a “solved” checkbox next to it. Handy for spotting solved questions or searching the forum for ones yet to be solved. I am thinking it might be best practice to have a ‘?’ for topics that can have solutions. i.e. I don’t ever expect for this topic to be solved, It should be a running thread of new features that the community wants. Probably a good place to request forum features too :slight_smile:

  2. Spoiler Alert - I wasn’t looking for this one, but it seemed like it could be a fun way to post challenges on how to code X for Blinks. i.e. Write a program to simulate forest fires… go! Here is the solution // forest fire code is here Pretty cool, right?! You have to hover for some clarity and then click to reveal. At very least, this will allow you all to discuss great films like The Six Sense and Shawshank Redemption.

That’s all the fun for the moment. Try them out and on your own topics, check to see if they are solved, and mark them as solved. Problem solvers will definitely be receiving badges! :medal_sports:

Here’s one request:

Great request @kenj, we’ve now got sub-categories :slight_smile:

Added this handy new feature to quickly copy code blocks. At this years Global Game Jam, it became clear that it was difficult to copy and paste from these useful tutorials and examples and that we needed a solution. Solved🎉
Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 12.03.51 PM

Ohhh, and i guess it makes sense to put a quick little demo here:

// This is a code block and you can copy 
// it all easily by clicking in the top right

void setup() {
  // do stuff once
}

void loop() {
  // do stuff
}
1 Like