I am adding the ability for Members to “Bcc” other Members when they send a PM.
Because my website does not - and will not!! - use JavaScript this go round, it is complicated at best to make it so the “Bcc:” field can toggle on and off.
Here on SitePoint, when you go to send a PM, you are presented only with “To:”, “Subject:” and “Message:” fields, and only by clicking on the “Bcc:” hyperlink, do you get this field.
I can mimic that behavior without JavaScript, but if a person has already typed up a long PM in my form, and then wants to add a “Bcc:”, it is rather involved for me to “persist” the form data, and add a “Bcc:” field.
Anyway, so on to my question…
Is it a big deal if I always show the “Bcc:” field in my “Send PM” form??
[font=calibri]No, it’s fine. You might find that some people get confused and don’t know the difference between the recipient lines, but that isn’t a major problem – if they BCC someone instead of To them, it’s hardly the end of the world. What’s more important is to make sure they don’t put the subject line in there.
If you want to include the option to have BCC, you don’t want to use Javascript to toggle the visibility of that field, and persisting the message contents to a new page (as happens on here if you click the ‘Go Advanced’ button) is more hassle than you think it merits then you don’t have a whole lot of options![/font]
I was thinking of maybe making the “Bcc:” Text Area only 1 line (instead of 2) to downplay it somewhat.
Do you think your average user is smart enough to know that they can drag the handle on a Text Area control to make it bigger? :-/
At first I thought it would be easy…
I would just have a Bcc link like SitePoint does, and send a parameter in the hyperlink’s query string to tell my PHP to display the “Bcc:” field.
That works great when the sequence is…
Click Bcc link --> Type PM --> Enter To: and Bcc: Recipients
But if the sequence goes…
Type in To:, Subject:, and *really long* PM ---> Click Bcc link
…I would have some pretty P.O.'d users when they lose their PM?!
[ot]More of a question for the PHP Forum, but can you think of any way around that so the Form Data persists in the 2nd Scenario without using JavaScript??
If could make a Form Button labeled “Add Bcc” and then use the $_POST data… (Kinda flaky, though?!)
Or, maybe I could I use Sessions to persist the Form Data?
