It’s definitely a quirky little nuisance. Beyond quirky, I think.
Yeah. I’ve tried to engage in message-board style conversation on Reddit. I found it impossible to follow, and all the conversations died within a few posts.
I’m not sure there is such a thing as “intuitive”; or at any rate, everything on a computer that anybody’s ever told me was intuitive was something that I had to learn, and at least half of it struck me as counterintuitive.
Yes there is. Look at the upper right of the post.
If you quote somebody, it’s even clearer. But it’s there even if you don’t.
(Maybe it doesn’t show on a phone? I don’t know, mine’s useless for browsing anyway so I don’t try.)
The only time the quote disappears is if it’s the entirety of the post just above your reply. Don’t want it to do that? Leave a letter or a punctuation mark out of your quote. (I agree that’s not intuitive; but it’s a really easy workaround.)
Yes, once you realize how it works. And frankly I don’t get the rationale for not showing who you’re quoting when you quote the whole previous post. That feature frequently confuses people who are reading the response, because sometimes it is not clear what the response is to, and it looks like the responder has been careless and just hit the big Reply button, instead of replying to a specific post. It seems to me that an exception was built into the software for that situation (i.e. responding to the previous post by quoting the whole post), but the exception just makes no sense. Not to me anyway.
Yes, this is exactly what I said. Every single day I see posters doing exactly that.
No it isn’t, not if you reply to the quote directly above your own. If you just hit the reply to button to that post, without quoting something, there is NO arrow indicating whether it’s a reply to the previous post or a reply to the topic in general (and no, it isn’t always obvious from the context). And if you do quote the entire post without making some change, it completely disappears (unless you know ahead of time that this won’t work, which people don’t know until it’s pointed out to them). And again there’s no indicator arrow in the corner showing that it’s a reply to the previous post.
Testing.
ETA: Yup, you’re right; same thing on my desktop.
I suppose the idea is, that if there’s no indication who’s being replied to, everybody’s supposed to assume that it’s the post immediately above. Problem is, as you say, it wouldn’t necessarily be, because somebody might have hit ‘reply to thread’ instead of ‘reply to post’ of a different poster.
Otherwise, though, I think the quote function here works much better than it did on the old version of the boards, where you had to quote the entire post and then possibly delete several paragraphs before and/or after the part you wanted to address.
Today I learned that the co-founder of Stack Exchange (!!!) does tech support for the SDMB as a volunteer gig. That is quite something.
Codinghorror hates repeats. I guess he remembers the old Usenet days when things would automatically get quoted and it was a pain to sort through. He doesn’t seem to understand that those days are gone and that the main reason that you would quote the post you are responding to is to make it clear that you are responding to that specific post and not just replying to the thread.
So unfortunately we’re stuck with it. The workaround is that you have to be aware of it, and you have to resort to tricks like leaving off the final period in the quote in order to get it to work (as was already mentioned).
Exactly. Leaving the quote intact wouldn’t be an issue. vBulletin left the quote intact and it wasn’t a cluttered mess. But removing the quote leads to obvious problems, like this:
OP:
I think X. Do you agree?
Post 1:
No, I think it’s the opposite.
Post 2 as intended:
QUOTE No, I think it’s the opposite
I agree.
Post 2 as it actually comes out after the software edits it:
Post2:
I agree.
Post 2 completely changes its meaning because it is implied that it is replying to the entire thread when it’s really a reply to only the post before it.
But, like I said, it appears that we are stuck with it.
Well, my userscript does get rid of it, in a rather crude way. (It adds an extra unprintable character whenever you use the full quote button.)
Today I found this site while Googling:
There is a button there to copy an invisible character, if you do a full quote you can paste that character to the end and then the quote can be intact and you haven’t changed its appearance at all.
Your userscript would also work I’m sure but this is an alternative to that.
I agree that this “feature” is an annoyance, albeit a minor one with some easy workarounds. My workaround if I want to prevent Discourse from automatically deleting a full quote in reply to an immediately preceding post is to append the following to the quote:
This is invisible HTML code for a non-breaking space and by invisibly altering the quote prevents the auto-deletion. (Or you can use the suggestion by @Atamasama posted below). That same HTML string is also useful for filling out posts that Discourse in its wisdom deems are “too short”.
Another minor design annoyance is to omit specifying the year in the post date if it was less than a year ago, which is usually fine but has odd effects if the post was from the previous year. For example, today is June 8. Your post is dated May 31 with no year and that’s fine – perfectly clear. But a post that was made, say, on June 10, 2023 would be dated Jun 10, with no year. The presumption is that since June 10 is in the future, this must obviously be Jun 10 of the previous year, but it’s potentially confusing.
Another annoyance with dates that I think has since been fixed that affected at least some themes was the infamous two-digit year, where a post made, say, in May of 2023 would be dated “May '23”, which was virtually indistinguishable from “May 23”.
All these design decisions have one thing in common: the apparent belief that redundancy should be avoided and only the minimum necessary information should be displayed. This appeal to technical elegance is appropriate for a computer-to-computer communication protocol, but for a computer-to-human UI, sometimes some appropriate redundancy is desirable to avoid misinterpretations by us fallible humans.
You are correct. It has been fixed. It now says May 2023 instead of May '23.
Yes, thank you, this is exactly the point. Who is this board for, anyway, if not the people who post on it and read it? It doesn’t generate income to speak of, and I suspect it doesn’t bring any bright shine of achievement to any executives of the entity that owns it. And it is certainly not “for” the software that it runs on nor whoever is responsible for taking care of that software. In short, I don’t care what “codinghorror” hates. that is neither relevant nor interesting.
Sure, but codinghorror doesn’t care what you hate, and the difference is that his opinion matters, because it decides what the software does.
A reminder before someone violates a Moderator instruction:
Also a reminder this thread was bumped by a troll.