The web based discussion client we're using to run some Gifted and Talented kids' online academic discussion groups is not the most powerful of user clients, in part becasue when we set the original templates up we were working under some quite rigid constraints regarding how freely the users were allowed to communicate (pre-moderation of all posts was required, for example).
We've since managed to relax the pre-moderation requirement, replacing it instead with a 'Report this Post' button which fires off an email to a moderator, although it doesn't - at the moment - take the post down automatically.
But there are still a few things that are lacking which are starting to affect the quality of discussion in the group, not least the inability of users to embed images in their message (although they can include an anchor link to an image, or upload one as a file attachement).
As I don't have access to the web interface templates, this isn't something I can fix directly, but in the web pioneering sense of "if it's broke, fix it" I thought I'd try a couple of client side solutions using bookmarklets and a Greasemonkey script.
And this is the result - firstly, the user has to write a statement along the lines of:
image:example.com/myImage.jpg
or
image:nagty.open.ac.uk/Images/NAGTY_HE_GW_logo.jpg
The image so described can then be automagically added to the post by using the following bookmarklet (based on a linkifier bookmarklet from here): Imagify
Alternatively, there is ths Greasemonkey Imagifier script - whenever you open a page with image:whatever... the images will be added to the page.
Note the the URL of the image MUST NOT include http://
Posted by ajh59 at April 10, 2006 08:54 PM