Heh. That’s exactly the complaint: readers have no way to tell what a post is replying to under certain conditions.
Ah, the irony. [That was a reply to my 4th grade English teacher, who asked me for an example of irony 47 years ago.]
From Discourse Meta on a quick search. One site owner mentioned the quote not showing up. The function can be removed by the admin. The function was added in Jan. 2019.
I can’t help but notice that the same handful of people are in every thread complaining about Discourse. Several people show their displeasure with codinghorror over and over and over. Since he’s the only person who has shown a willingness to change things for the better, I’m not seeing the productivity of that. But maybe I missed the memo with the fun and prizes.
It seems as though there are usualy a number of different people, but sure, there are some who take an interest in the board and making it better.
I’ve not seen this willingness to help and make it better, i’ve seen him emoticon shrug and tell people to get over it.
Yeah, you missed something, not sure what, to have made the claims that you have made here.
Your links may be useful to the admin in fixing this, but @codinghorror did not supply such links, nor act in any productive way to fix this annoyance.
You can’t?
Count me in as someone irritated by this too. What is especially annoying is when quoted text gets stripped out of someone’s post because the post they’re quoting was directly preceding theirs at the time the started responding, then a reply or two (or more) sneaks in before the reply is posted.
Some posts directed at @codinghorror (not in this thread, a while back) were imo shockingly entitled and rude, so I’m certainly not surprised that he doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy about us. There’s a sense in which we are “customers”, but it’s not as though we paid some huge fee for a customized platform.
I’m not saying that we are entitled to help from him. I’m just saying that such help doesn’t seem to have been offered to change things for the better as indicated by @Heffalump_and_Roo.
(who am I replying to? You’ll never know, muhahahaha.)
I can’t. The software won’t even let me highlight it.
You have to go around the image itself.
~Max
I have. He’s been extremely helpful in a number of threads. He showed me how to get back to something I’d just been viewing, for instance. But he’s answered tons of questions and actually been very patient explaining stuff. He also got the Discourse admins to fix some odds and ends that users on this board were complaining about.
I know that i tend to be a squeaky wheel. I’m grateful to those who have patience with me.
These responses don’t make sense to me. It seems clear to me that the post is talking about this particular thread. And, yes, in this thread, he’s not being helpful. His last post seems to be completely ignoring all the points we made. He says there are workarounds, but they aren’t—none of them make the post automatically show who the reply is to. None of them prevent the exploit I mentioned. All of them make things harder on the users, not easier.
It seems to me that this thread has gotten off track. The focus of this thread should be to try and get this fix (which is, BTW, a compromise) implemented. (Or, yes, if you think we don’t need the fix, then argue against it.) Gripes about the poster or gripes said poster may have about others are at best irrelevant, and at worst create additional barriers to getting things done.
Personally, I see what @Riemann says as an insult. It would be extremely childish to refuse to make a needed change because you’re upset about past interactions. That entire logic is misguided to me, and it doesn’t help get any change made.
I am a full proponent of “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” But I also think we need to avoid things that muffle that squeaky wheel. I would personally like to see moderation that would say that past interactions (other than ones about this topic) were off topic—that, if you have personal issues with any poster, the correct forum for addressing those is in the Pit.
What’s the male equivalent of a Karen?
You seem to imagine that @codinghorror and/or the Discourse team owe us something. Or more specifically owe you something. They don’t.
I’d like to clarify some factual background, because some posters in this topic seem confused about it.
The site is running on vanilla Discourse. The SDMB did not pay for any customization, although I think we are paying Discourse to physically host our data. Vanilla Discourse allows the administrator to set a huge number of parameters, and all the changes that Tubadiva made when we first moved here were simple changes to the parameters that any admin can make. Things like defining what conditions allow someone to reach various trust levels, or turning off image hosting and likes – those aren’t coding changes, they are just parameter tweaks.
The change people are lobbying for in this topic is NOT something that can be changed by tweaking parameters. It would be an actual change to the code of Discourse. Every poster here and all our mods and admins and the owner of the site could all agree that we prefer this change, and Discourse can ignore us. We are just one of a great many sites that use the software, after all.
And while codinghorror is the author of Discourse, he is just an ordinary poster here. He’s not our employee. He’s not even an admin for this site. He doesn’t owe the SDMB anything. Any changes he’s made, any advice he’s offered, he’s done out of generosity.
Now, I happen to think that Discourse would be improved for all sites if they added a little arrow to let you know whether a post was replying to the post immediately above it or to the topic at large (effective, to the OP). And I am in favor of efforts to make a persuasive argument for that, because codinghorror and other people who work for Discourse sometimes read this site, and who knows, they might be persuaded. But let’s keep our role here in mind, and not imply that we can demand anything.
I think it’s important, however, to differentiate between discussing (or whining or complaining) about a problem and demanding a change.
What’s going on here, and in some of the other similar threads, seems to be mostly people venting about frustrations they’re having with the board software, possibly hoping for something to get fixed. No one is demanding anything be done about it. And, while this may have happened, I haven’t seen anyone or any groups of people, suggesting that if the changes aren’t made, they’ll leave and find somewhere else to post.
It’s probably also important to note that some of these ‘frustrations’ may seem like demands because of the special situation we’re in with the creator being part of the community.
Think about it like this. If you and your buddies all bought first gen Mustangs and liked to hang out a the local bar and talk about them, specifically the problems you had with them and how to fix them. It would just be a bunch of guys talking about their cars. However, if one of those guys was Lee Iacocca, talking about the problems might seem more like requests to fix the problems. Granted, those guys are aware they have an audience with someone in a position to actually make the changes, but that doesn’t mean they’re demanding anything.
It’s the same here, if codinghorror weren’t part of the dope, we’d still be having this discussion.
Thanks for writing this, puzzlegal. It’s beautifully written. I’ll bookmark it for the next thread like this one.
As I see it, there are two issues discussed in this thread. One can be fixed in the admin control panel and one can’t.
The issue with Discourse deleting the entire previous post if it’s quoted in its entirety can be fixed in the admin control panel. See here on Discourse Meta. One admin who turned off the feature soon realized how repetitive the site became.
The other issue is that Discourse doesn’t distinguish between replying to the OP and replying to the post above. That needs a change in code or a plug-in. The issue is discussed on Discourse Meta here. It’s pretty clear from that thread and this one that changing that feature is not a priority for the Discourse team since there are so many easy ways to make the communication clearer by quoting and context.
In both cases, any change would have to go through the admin on the SDMB…
Nothing in the linked thread says anything about an admin changing that feature and soon realizing how repetitive the site became.
OP asked why it was happening. Someone else told them how to fix it. OP thanked them, thinking it was a bug. Codinghorror said it’s bad form to quote an entire thread and added “why add that duplication to the stream… it’s noise for all future readers”.
But Discourse will happily remove both the arrow AND the quote, leaving you with only context, which doesn’t always make it clear.
But if someone really wanted this feature, the code is open source and the Discourse team is apparently willing to add the feature if someone puts in the work.
~Max
Been posting and reading the boards a bit more lately, and this issue just keeps rearing it’s ugly head. It really gets in the way of easy usability for me.
Seems like a conceptually easy fix (just always include the reply arrow). Wish it was worth the technical effort to put in place. Would dramatically improve my user experience, from my perspective.