Auto correct function or suggestion for words when typing.

[Guest]

My question is will this function be available in the future on this site & if the answer is yes when can we expect it to be implemented : Auto correct function or suggestions for words when typing.

I am asking as sometimes i use an azerty keyboard as well as qwerty, the latter i am more familiar with & i have big hands & thick fingers so often i press the wrong button & a suggestion for a word would cut the time it takes to type each specific word & make the site overall more user friendly for all members.

[BootmanLA]

13 hours ago, manhole4use said:

My question is will this function be available in the future on this site & if the answer is yes when can we expect it to be implemented : Auto correct function or suggestions for words when typing.

I am asking as sometimes i use an azerty keyboard as well as qwerty, the latter i am more familiar with & i have big hands & thick fingers so often i press the wrong button & a suggestion for a word would cut the time it takes to type each specific word & make the site overall more user friendly for all members.

I can't imagine any easy way that this could be implemented here, given that this site is built using a third-party (ie "developed by an outside company") package of software designed for the creation of forums like this. The site owner has no control over the underlying code here.

This is the difference between a typical web application - like this - and what we think of as "apps" (for mobile devices, running Android or IOS). In the latter, it's easy for the operating system underlying all the apps to provide this functionality; it's "once and done" with the code and all each app has to do is link into that functionality. And the app developer doesn't have to make that app work anywhere but on his one chosen device if that's all he wants to do.

With websites like this, the underlying "OS" directly below the site level is, essentially, HTML itself, or the web, which doesn't have such functionality built in. And underneath that, the OS of various devices is vastly more heterogenous - assorted versions of Windows for both desktop and server, assorted versions of IOS, assorted versions of macOS, ChromeOS, Android (in multiple flavors), multiple flavors of Unix and LInux, and more - so all of those would have to include "back end code" for auto-correct/typing suggestions to be available on a website.

[Guest]

10 hours ago, BootmanLA said:

I can't imagine any easy way that this could be implemented here, given that this site is built using a third-party (ie "developed by an outside company") package of software designed for the creation of forums like this. The site owner has no control over the underlying code here.

This is the difference between a typical web application - like this - and what we think of as "apps" (for mobile devices, running Android or IOS). In the latter, it's easy for the operating system underlying all the apps to provide this functionality; it's "once and done" with the code and all each app has to do is link into that functionality. And the app developer doesn't have to make that app work anywhere but on his one chosen device if that's all he wants to do.

With websites like this, the underlying "OS" directly below the site level is, essentially, HTML itself, or the web, which doesn't have such functionality built in. And underneath that, the OS of various devices is vastly more heterogenous - assorted versions of Windows for both desktop and server, assorted versions of IOS, assorted versions of macOS, ChromeOS, Android (in multiple flavors), multiple flavors of Unix and LInux, and more - so all of those would have to include "back end code" for auto-correct/typing suggestions to be available on a website.

Thank you for your answers to my questions even though it went a little over my head i do understand that it will be difficult to implement within the existing program ( what a pity ) well maybe when they upgrade the site they will consider this for being a little more user friendly for all users, i can imagine also as an app it can be useful too for big fingered users like me using there phone to type or keyboards. It's just a little extra that would make it more nicer & convenient.

[chi4loads]

I hear you about fat fingering when typing on a small screen.  The desktop browsers I've tried support some form of spell checking (usually highlighting with red squigglies) but Safari on IOS doesn't seem to.   Maybe Chrome does. 

[BootmanLA]

13 hours ago, manhole4use said:

Thank you for your answers to my questions even though it went a little over my head i do understand that it will be difficult to implement within the existing program ( what a pity ) well maybe when they upgrade the site they will consider this for being a little more user friendly for all users, i can imagine also as an app it can be useful too for big fingered users like me using there phone to type or keyboards. It's just a little extra that would make it more nicer & convenient.

It's not likely to be implemented. I get the concept that it might be useful, but if you think about it, only a handful of web sites (as opposed to apps) have anything like auto-complete or auto-correct. You'll find it in standalone applications like Word, or Outlook, or whatever - but that's because the application code itself (which resides on your local computer) includes a code library with usage rules and the like that can do this sort of prediction. You see it in phone/tablet apps because the operating system (Android or IOS) includes that kind of library as well.

But the only websites you find with it are places like Google, which have giant server farms that store and analyze millions of search phrases per minute, so they know that if you type "HIV infection rates in", it can match that with your location, and pre-fill in "the United States" or "Great Britain" or "Australia" or wherever it is that it detects you're typing from. Those things are also smart enough to predict the top four or five options to finish your query, almost certainly one of which is likely correct. So starting with "oldest man" might offer choices for "in history", "alive 2022", "to father child", and so forth - seemingly very smart, but in reality just playing the odds that what you're searching for is something other people have already searched for.

Otherwise, websites simply don't have the processing power on the servers that "serve them up" to do that kind of prediction. It would be ghastly expensive, for one thing. But more significantly, since there are so many different web browsers for people to access the web with, the only way to incorporate that kind of functionality is to write it yourself specifically in the code for your site itself (because that's the only common denominator between, say, you using your iPhone's Safari browser and me using my desktop's Chrome browser.

Not only is that the kind of task that would take an army of coders, but then loading every page would require downloading that entire dictionary of what word(s) might be logically meant if you start typing every possible combination of letters. It's as though in order to view any page on a website, it would have to download a copy of the Bible for *every* page, before you could begin typing in a form. Imagine how slow it would be to go just from page to page on this site when you have that kind of constant traffic in the background of every single page load.

[ErosWired]

There are some highly annoying fat-finger issues that an autocorrect function isn’t going to fix anyway. The biggest one that makes me crazy is if/of. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve finished and sent a post only to discover that half the times I’ve tried to write the word of it ends up as if, just because the two vowels are adjacent. But autocorrect wouldn’t catch it anyway - they’re both legitimate words. The only solution, I guess, is for me to run my fingertips through a pencil sharpener.

[BannedWord]

3 minutes ago, ErosWired said:

There are some highly annoying fat-finger issues that an autocorrect function isn’t going to fix anyway. The biggest one that makes me crazy is if/of. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve finished and sent a post only to discover that half the times I’ve tried to write the word of it ends up as if, just because the two vowels are adjacent. But autocorrect wouldn’t catch it anyway - they’re both legitimate words. The only solution, I guess, is for me to run my fingertips through a pencil sharpener.

This is precisely why I despise typing on a mobile (iPhone) keyboard, I've never caught the hang of typing with two thumbs and I'm afraid in a few generations we'll evolve to malformed fingers and massive but precise thumbs. I make more mistakes that way and end up recorrecting. The only thing worse is that I have auto-correct on my laptops. 

[BootmanLA]

7 minutes ago, ErosWired said:

There are some highly annoying fat-finger issues that an autocorrect function isn’t going to fix anyway. The biggest one that makes me crazy is if/of. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve finished and sent a post only to discover that half the times I’ve tried to write the word of it ends up as if, just because the two vowels are adjacent. But autocorrect wouldn’t catch it anyway - they’re both legitimate words. The only solution, I guess, is for me to run my fingertips through a pencil sharpener.

The other option, some of the time (where one can talk in private) is to use text-to-speech and to speak clearly into the phone. It may require some fixes, but they should be more readily visible before you hit "send" because the mistakes made in text-to-speech tend not to involve the same kind of misspellings. 

[ErosWired]

5 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

The other option, some of the time (where one can talk in private) is to use text-to-speech and to speak clearly into the phone. It may require some fixes, but they should be more readily visible before you hit "send" because the mistakes made in text-to-speech tend not to involve the same kind of misspellings. 

Using text-to-speech with a Kentucky southern drawl swiftly exposes the limitations of the technology.

[BannedWord]

9 minutes ago, ErosWired said:

Using text-to-speech with a Kentucky southern drawl swiftly exposes the limitations of the technology.

I'm originally from Philly. Here's how well that works.

South Philadelphia = Sou Fluffia
Water ice = Wooder ice
Eagles = Iggles
Beautiful = Bee-You-Tee-Full
Police = Pleese

I need to unlearn speaking through my nose and shift to the back of the throat. Every. Single. Time.

[BBArchangel]

44 minutes ago, TheSRQDude said:

I'm originally from Philly. Here's how well that works.

South Philadelphia = Sou Fluffia
Water ice = Wooder ice
Eagles = Iggles
Beautiful = Bee-You-Tee-Full
Police = Pleese

I need to unlearn speaking through my nose and shift to the back of the throat. Every. Single. Time.

You just need to remember where the rain in Spain falls.  Lol

Because of some old cancer treatment I have diminished feeling in the very tips of my fingers. This means not only was my guitar playing affected, but typing on a phone-sized keyboard made awkward. So I’ve wanted to dictate many of my messages. It does require enunciating and speaking more slowly. But for me, I find this more affective than hunting and pecking. And a Kentucky accent can’t be that much worse than an Irish one. Lol

[viking8x6]

If you're accessing the site on a mobile device, the soft keyboard used to input text on them very likely has autocomplete and autocorrect built in for text fields (which would include the ones on the BZ web site). You just need to make sure they are enabled (or not, as your preference dictates). They do work with other languages (at least my Samsung phone will handle English, French, and Spanish all at once - which makes it more error-prone as it can match anything in any of those languages).

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It's not likely to be implemented. I get the concept that it might be useful, but if you think about it, only a handful of web sites (as opposed to apps) have anything like auto-complete or auto-correct.

I'm not completely sure of this, but I believe that with newly-built web sites it is possible to outsource the task to Google's autocomplete/autocorrect engine. For a price. Then it just comes down to whether the developer/owner can make enough money on the site to be willing to pay for the service.