The MOSFET symbols provided by CircuitLab have two issues:
- While the symbol is one of the many "standards" followed for MOSFETs, it is, at least to my mind, perhaps one of the least intuitive to recognize. It certainly is one of the less commonly used variants of the MOSFET symbol.
- In addition, the lack of a body diode indication, at least for MOSFETs which have a body diode, as most do, makes an intuitive orientation / placement on a schematic that much more difficult.
This answer actually covers the MOSFET ground quite well.
The reason this comes to the fore again today is a recent question, where comments indicate both that the OP might have been confused by the symbol, and that other members blame the OP for the confusion, whereas the blame should lie squarely with CircuitLab. This is not the first time some ill-informed or poorly designed aspect of CircuitLab has been called out on this site.
Kortuk's answer to another meta post mentions that CircuitLab issues, bug reports and feature requests need to be raised directly with CircuitLab, and I have done so on multiple occasions, without ever seeing a fix or hearing back from them, not even so much as an acknowledgement.
Is there a way that StackExchange can push the right buttons with CircuitLab to actually make some changes? The Electronics StackExchange site is evidently providing CircuitLab a lot of brand visibility, much of it (in my opinion) highly undeserved because of how utterly crap the product is, on multiple counts.
I'd venture to say that even the hobbyist oriented, open source schematic products like Fritzing do a less shoddy job than the for-profit CircuitLab - so what is this site getting out of CircuitLab, to give them the visibility they're getting through us?