Weird question: as late as this morning, whenever I went to

[niyad]

reply, any number of my standard replies would show up, and I just had to click on it to post. Since I got back just now, that is not happening. Is this some new thing?

[highplainsdem]

1. Are you talking about autocomplete offering you alternatives after you type the start to a typical reply?

The first three letters of thanks for example giving you earlier replies you'd typed starting with that word?

Yes, that does seem to be gone now.

I don't mind, since I found it distracting.

[niyad]

5. yes.

[highplainsdem]

8. Did you really like having autocomplete there? I found that sometimes when I'd start typing and an assortment

of sentences starting with the same word or words would pop up, I'd scan them automatically and then have to try to remember just what I'd planned to say before the autocomplete bot tripped me up.

[niyad]

9. Actually, yes. Because of some issues that I have with my

tablet, I have found it very helpful.

[highplainsdem]

10. Oh. Okay.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. What did you do to scare off the friendly ghost?

[niyad]

6. No idea.

[Yonnie3]

3. I noticed the same thing this evening

It seems a new thing.

There are times that I hate that function and times I find it useful.

[niyad]

4. Glad it is not just me.

[Yonnie3]

7. So much change on DU - hard to keep up!

I found one place it still works, Advanced Search, so it is not everywhere.

[EarlG]

11. It was requested that we remove auto-complete from input fields

So we've started doing that. The post pages have been fixed, but it will take us a little time to get every input field on the site -- we'll just be doing these as we find them. That means there's going to be a period where you may find some pages that allow auto-complete on their input boxes, and others that don't.

If anyone finds one that does, feel free to report it here so that we can keep track of it.

[niyad]

12. Thank you for the explanation. Alas, I am one of those who

preferred it.

[EarlG]

13. Then perhaps this requires a little more thought

Last edited Tue Oct 24, 2023, 04:48 PM - Edit history (1)

The people who requested that we remove it were having trouble turning off auto-complete in their browsers. Since there is a way to turn auto-complete off via code, we decided to do that.

But perhaps this should be situational. Currently auto-complete is only turned off on post forms -- when you're starting a new OP or reply, the subject line will not auto-complete. In that situation, I don't think auto-complete is necessary. It must surely be pretty rare for someone to want to write the same subject line enough times that they need auto-complete to do it for them. In the vast majority of cases, people are going to be writing something new in the subject line box.

However there are other situations where it might be more useful to keep auto-complete, for example, on the Advanced Search page. In that case, I think it would probably be much more likely for someone to search for the same thing more than once.

As of now we're going to leave things the way they are, with auto-complete turned off only when entering post subject lines. We'll leave it turned on everywhere else, but this is something we can look at on a case-by-case basis in future, if necessary.