re Spell check function
Can the Check spelling/Show errors function be adjusted to always show errors in the text itself rather than in the popup window? I personally kind of like the squiggly red underline showing under the misspelled word so I can take a crack at correcting the error myself.
I'm afraid I and a lot of others are going to be too lazy or too hurried to always bother clicking the Show Errors button.
(By the way, that pop up error box seems to take a little long to go away after you click the OK button to dismiss it.)
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In other words, it's obsolete and we should probably get rid of it, but we decided to keep it because there are still a few people on DU who use it regularly 
The spell checker is no longer really necessary because most modern browsers have spell checkers built in (plus auto-correct if you're on mobile).
So when you see those squiggly red lines underneath misspelled words, like this:
-- that's your browser doing the work, it's got nothing to do with DU.
The spell check function is one of the only remaining pieces of code on DU that wasn't written by Elad or myself -- it was a third-party package that I think we might have even had on DU2, which means it could be 20 years old. Unfortunately neither Elad nor I are experts in the language it's written in, so given its "legacy" status we're probably not going to go in and try to mess around with it...