spell check Options

[joe]

Is there a spell check feature on this bulletin board?

[Shawn]

no, not at the moment. Have you, or anyone else, seen spell checkers on any other forums? I ask because I'm not sure if I have, but if someone could tell me a forum where they have one, it should make the job of implementing a spell checker in this forum much easier.

[rhymer]

A PHP spell checker is available from the site below.
I don't know if it can be integrated into the Mind-Brain Board.

http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:Eui75N...&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

An English list of words is available at
http://www.master-technology.com/

All donationware.

[rhymer]

In any case, there is a plug-in spellchecker for use with several browsers including IE that works for text input to text boxes as in our Forums.

It is available at:-
http://www.iespell.com/

It is also rumoured that IE7 will include a spellchecker.

[Shawn]

thanks Bill. I found phpspell at the master-technology site, installed it on my local server and played around with the demo online. I don't like it. The dictionary (or word list) is over 2 MB, which is (expectedly) huge by text file standards. This word list gets imported into a MySQL database on the server. The problem is, that when I tried it on my local server, it completely tied up my server's resources for several minutes, and so I'm very wary of trying this out on the Mind-Brain.com server.

The other problem I had was with the demo... the spellchecker employes a pop-up window, which is annoying, but even more so is the user interface, which in my opinion has way too many buttons. Of course, it would be easy to remove some of the buttons on the interface, but it wouldn't change the fact that, what you want in a spell-checker is utter simplicity. For example, in a forum post, it would be nice to simply highlight possible mis-spelled words, and that's it. This whole idea of suggesting replacements and/or ignoring words is overkill.... it may be fine for a word-processor, but in a forum, I think you want speed and simplicity.

Thank you for the links. I'll look around a bit and see if I come up with anything. I think the size of the dictionary (or word list) may be problematic since I don't have infinite server space at my disposal, but I'm sure there are programs out there that will do the job. If I had more time, I would write up a script myself to do it, but it's not of sufficiently high priority to warrant doing this, at least for the time being.

[Shawn]

that iespell at http://www.iespell.com/ seems useful, though. I have it working on MyIE2 now (and used it to rapidly spell check this post), though I haven't tried it on FireFox yet (and am not expecting it to work on FireFox because it's not IE based).

[Joesus]