Community Update - July 2019

We have news about a New Text Editor, some new features of the new text editor and some other changes coming soon.

I am pleased to announce that we are making some big changes to the Editor that you use to post in the community. Starting today, you will see a new editor that incorporates some of the feedback we have received.

The design of this editor is cleaner and gives you more detailed control over content, such as, inserting tables. To make a table, you can now use the new Table button () to  insert a table, style the column, row or an individual cell.

For our developers we have code syntax highlighting. Select the Insert code button () and choose the language you wish to insert. Currently supported languages are:

• HTML/XML
• JavaScript
• CSS
• PHP
• Ruby
• Python
• Java
• C
• C#
• C++

We are, however, looking to add support for other languages, such as PowerShell, as soon as possible.

Python Example:

def greet(name):
    print 'Hello', name
greet('Jack')
greet('Jill')
greet('Bob')

code snippet from python.org.

Starting Tuesday * next week, all users will be able to copy and paste from Microsoft Word or other programs directly into the text editor, and any images will be retained and uploaded without the need to upload them separately.

You will also be able to drag and drop permitted attachments onto the editor window and have it attached as an attachment.

We will be pushing some changes to the community soon based on feedback from users, they are:

• Users will no longer be able to vote up or down vote ideas that have been marked as ‘completed’ – as submitted by Chris Gullicksen 
• DanielNiccoli  suggested removing infinite scroll in favor of paginated views. Paginated views only work for a collection that is not constantly changing and so we wanted to keep the feeds but we have implemented a 2 minute cache on the feed, so if you click into a message as long as you click back within 2 minutes you will be returned to the point in the message list you were previously. If you wish to refresh the cache you can do so by clicking the new refresh button at the top of the feed:
  After 2 minutes the cache will flush and refresh anyway.

Thank you both for your feedback and we are always open to new suggestions submitted via the community ideas board.

Other changes going live include:

• We are changing the Anniversary badges to a new design which we will use going forward
• We will be launching a subset of the Emoji’s currently in use on the Skype client, we want to see how users use them before we roll out more. Posts with excessive use of of emojis maybe edited or deleted by the admin team, in accordance with our Code of Conduct.
• We found a bug, where the labels field was being used, by some users when they compose a post, as a box to enter their email address to be notified when users reply. The labels box now has ‘Label’ next to it to make this clearer.

Stay tuned for news on how you can help us test new features, bug fixes and help us shape the Microsoft Tech Community.

*Update: the copy and paste of images has been delayed till tomorrow (Wed July 31^st)