People should not quote the preceding post in their reply!

mathepac

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One of the main reasons treads become so long (and boring at times) is this awful practice of allowing posters to quote the preceding post in full when replying, sometimes quoting in one post and then posting their one sentence response in another.

In the internet world this is regarded as bad manners and poor protocol observance. In other groups I participate in such posts are deleted with a warning to sin no more and persistent offenders may be suspended / banned.

I have raised this issue before but my suggestion to introduce such measures here has thus far fallen on deaf ears.
 
One of the main reasons treads become so long (and boring at times) is this awful practice of allowing posters to quote the preceding post in full when replying, sometimes quoting in one post and then posting their one sentence response in another.

In the internet world this is regarded as bad manners and poor protocol observance. In other groups I participate in such posts are deleted with a warning to sin no more and persistent offenders may be suspended / banned.

I have raised this issue before but my suggestion to introduce such measures here has thus far fallen on deaf ears.

That is a problem of the software layout. If you do the natural thing, and click on Reply

upload_2017-1-18_18-3-54.png


it quotes the entire post.

If you just type in the text box, and then hit

upload_2017-1-18_18-4-29.png

you don't quote the post.

I will have a look and see if this can be changed, because I find it very irritating as well.

But the other issue, is where people tag their question onto someone else's. It just makes more work for the moderators who have to move the posts to a separate thread. :)

Brendan
 
One of the main reasons treads become so long (and boring at times) is this awful practice of allowing posters to quote the preceding post in full when replying, sometimes quoting in one post and then posting their one sentence response in another...

Doesn't the new forum software effectively fix this, because it truncates long quotes with a "More..." button if you really want to see the whole thing? That said, the options are a little misleading since, the "Reply" link creates a quote, while the "Quote" link creates a so-called 'multi-quote'.
 
Also, sometimes when people quote long text and more shows up, it looks as if the new poster has said nothing until you delve into the quote and see that they have replied within the quote.

Other times, there's a quote and no response to it.
 
Is it a simple as relabelling the text on the buttons? "Reply" just positions the insertion point and cursor in the regular text-box, "Quote" quotes the contents of the post that instance of the "Quote" button appears in?
 
p.s The thread title "People should not quote the entire post in their reply!" doesn't really capture my thought or my suggestion. Maybe "People should not quote the preceding post in their reply!" would be closer.

pps I just discovered I'm still the thread starter so I fixed the title to my satisfaction. That's cool @Brendan. I thought once you had intervened I'd been demoted.
 
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Is it a simple as relabelling the text on the buttons? "Reply" just positions the insertion point and cursor in the regular text-box, "Quote" quotes the contents of the post that instance of the "Quote" button appears in?
That's not how it works though, is it? Both 'Reply' and 'Quote' quote the post you clicked them on, but whereas 'Reply' quotes just that one post, 'Quote' adds it to a list of quotes which may all be included when you comment.
 
OK, I will see if I can get rid of the "Reply" button which should be called "Reply quoting the full post"

Then if people want to quote the full post, they can click on +Quote (which they should do rarely)

They will have to figure out that to post a reply without quoting, they can just start typing in the box:

upload_2017-1-18_22-38-6.png
 
p.s The thread title "People should not quote the entire post in their reply!" doesn't really capture my thought or my suggestion. Maybe "People should not quote the preceding post in their reply!" would be closer.

pps I just discovered I'm still the thread starter so I fixed the title to my satisfaction. That's cool @Brendan. I thought once you had intervened I'd been demoted.

It's not the preceding post. Every post in the thread has a "Reply(with full post text)" button.
 
It's not the preceding post. Every post in the thread has a "Reply(with full post text)" button.
That's my point. It is quoting the preceding post that gets my goat, clogs up threads and makes them difficult to follow.

I have just quoted the preceding post by clicking "Reply" and it adds nothing to the thread and offers the reader no clearer insight into the discussion or the flow. It does however create an unnecessary reference link/entry in the database, adds to the space occupied on the screen and necessitates more "pages" to navigate and scroll through.

If I want to make a point about a post earlier in the thread, say #3, then it is valid to quote the bit I want as you helpfully demonstrated in #5.

I haven't quoted the posts I wanted to refer to and although I admit tis is a small thread, is it a big deal to scroll back?
 
That's my point. It is quoting the preceding post that gets my goat, clogs up threads and makes them difficult to follow.
A matter of preference I guess -- I much prefer a short relevant quote with every post. I speed-read several dozen email alerts from AAM most days, don't even have to follow the link on most of them (thanks to Brendan's insistence on descriptive topic titles), and the remainder I can usually jump to the last comment or two, where I'd much prefer to see a pithy quote than have to traipse back through the thread to establish context.
 
Xenforo have code at the bottom of the thread here to change the reply button so that a user simply replies to the thread and does not quote. However, it seems from posts above that this would not keep everyone happy.
 
Thanks Ciarán

I thought that disabling it was the solution, but it's not. Say I want to reply to Mathepac's first post

upload_2017-1-19_7-56-54.png


The only way of replying to it is to hit the Reply button which quotes the entire post.

If we disable it, then to reply, I would have to scroll all the way down.

Let's try it out. I presume it's reversible if we find it's not working?

Please change it so that Clicking the Reply button just opens the reply box without any quote.



Brendan
 
I have changed the code.

It took a little bit of playing around with the code. I don't think I have caused any knock on effects but let me know anyone spots anything amiss!
 
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The reply button used to set focus on the reply box at the bottom (i.e. cursor was active) but it no longer does.
 
Sorry, code never ends up being as simple as I think at first.

I can remove the reply button completely but it causes the reply button when highlighting text with the cursor to also be removed. Both go.

There has to be a way to remove one without removing the other, I will have a look at the weekend.

The only way I could fix it was to leave 2 reply links. 1 labelled as "reply" which includes quotes and 1 labelled as "reply thread" which does not include quotes.

@Brendan Burgess - If you want me to revert the code to the way it was let me know.
 
Looking at the way it is now, it seems everything is the same as before except for the new Reply Thread link which replies without any quoting ... but previously you could do that just by typing in the reply box without hitting any links (and you still can). Not sure it adds a whole lot, unless it satisfies the original complaint that people were unthinkingly hitting the Reply link and not noticing the quotes. In that case I think the labels that are currently Quote, Reply and Reply Thread would be more descriptive as: Multiquote, Quote and Reply, respectively. (I doubt anyone used Multiquote much so the obscurity of the new name is hardly a loss).
 
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