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Better reply quoting

SecretAgentHulk·12/27/2014, 5:38:36 PM·2 votes·1,083 views

I normally view threads by discussion rather than chronology, and it gets really bad when someone, obviously preferring chronologic sorting, quotes the previous post. Often, after the fifteenth reply, when the view is getting really constricted, quoting makes it almost impossible to keep my place in the discussion. Other times, after someone has written a 1500 word essay in response to something, someone else will quote it and I have to scroll all the way through again to read what they wanted to say. In the latter case, at least, I'm sure chronological readers would also find it annoying to have to scroll so far through.

This is something I think you can do better. A solution, but by no means the solution: Get rid of "quote" as an option for replying. (Keep > quoting, but remove the "quote whole post" option.) You already have the means to keep track of what replies to what, as it is utilized for discussion view, so add a small blurb above posts in chronological view that says "In response to RandoSummoner44" with an option to show the post right there. I think this would significantly reduce the visual clutter of reading responses in both discussion and chronological view, contributing to a better Boards experience.

4 Comments

Deep Terror Nami12/27/2014, 6:09:41 PM1 votes

The perpetually constricting reply boxes are certainly annoying; but you might think of it as an incentive to stop talking and move on.

Elphrihaim12/27/2014, 9:12:04 PM1 votes

{quoted}

I normally view threads by discussion rather than chronology, and it gets really bad when someone, obviously preferring chronologic sorting, quotes the previous post.

:/ And people in chronological view hate it when you make a context-sensitive statement without quoting, because then it becomes literally impossible to figure out what you're talking about.

Often, after the fifteenth reply, when the view is getting really constricted, quoting makes it almost impossible to keep my place in the discussion. Other times, after someone has written a 1500 word essay in response to something, someone else will quote it and I have to scroll all the way through again to read what they wanted to say. In the latter case, at least, I'm sure chronological readers would also find it annoying to have to scroll so far through.

I don't mind. I much prefer it when people do what I'm doing here, though.

This is something I think you can do better. A solution, but by no means the solution: Get rid of "quote" as an option for replying. (Keep > quoting, but remove the "quote whole post" option.)

I like the button. It's useful because it allows me to get the entire text of your post, still formatted, in my post to dissect for responses to individual points.

You already have the means to keep track of what replies to what, as it is utilized for discussion view, so add a small blurb above posts in chronological view that says "In response to RandoSummoner44" with an option to show the post right there.

This, I agree, is needed, but there's a bigger problem.

I think this would significantly reduce the visual clutter of reading responses in both discussion and chronological view, contributing to a better Boards experience.

That bigger problem being the separated views. In many forums, it is common practice to quote multiple people at the same time, to reply to all of them in a single post.

Doing that here ends up being a bad idea-- anybody that you actually wanted to reply to does not get the message unless they're patrolling the thread constantly.

However, it is worse than that. People structure their reply based on their view, which makes people that use Chronological View get easily annoyed at people who are using Discussion (for example, seeing 5 posts, all made by the same person, with very similar text in every single one, all made within about 10 minutes-- that are only one line long--In Chronological, this looks like spam. In Discussion, it looks like somebody trying to inform), and vice-versa (for example, replying to 5 people in the same post).