Quotes on this board used to include all prior nested quotes, and was rarely, if ever, a problem.
If EVERY new post is made by replying to the latest post in the thread, that would make a mess. It would look like e-mail thread where every reply copies the entire prior text of the whole thread. But that was not the way most posts were made.
If most new posts are made by clicking on “Reply” at the bottom of the thread, that should be no problem.
Yeah.
Some of them, though, are important to the system. Titles, for instance. To change your title, you must select one from the list Discourse provides. That list is governed by what badges you’ve earned, and most badges don’t qualify.
Of course, mods can set any user’s title to anything they want.
Aside:
All of the badges are good. You did a good thing to get it, like showing up 365 consecutive days. Why should that be? Can’t we have badges for the utter fuckups, too? Since admin can make their own badges and award them at their pleasure, I don’t see why not.
I miscommunicated. Let me try again.
Threaded quotes in the reply box aren’t a problem. Not for me, anyway. If I think one’s too long or contains unneeded information, I’ll trim it back.
What I’m talking about is only using the reply to post button with no actual quoting. It shows who is being replied to, but not which post or which part of the post. And that is how everybody does it.
There is a button you can click that will show you the quoted post, but it also shows all the posts it’s dependent on. So you have to wade through all of that just to see what the heck the poster is talking about, and even then you have to guess at which part of the quoted post is being addressed.
That will not work on this board. Please, everybody, quote the parts you’re replying to.
Weird, spellcheck didn’t catch it. (Chrome spellcheck sucks)
Oh, and to multi-quote, do it the same way as a single-quote, but do it multiple times.
Click the reply to post button on the first post. Then click the speech balloon button. Then click the reply to post button on the next post. Then click the balloon again. And so on.
Not sure if I skipped it somewhere… Charter Member badges? I could care less about “I know how to post” badges; I have scores of those from too many other Discourse boards that I hate.
Badges are like stickers for grownups.
They’re like all those little badges you got when you were in Cub Scouts.
Do badges have properties associated with them? Can badges be defined to confer special privileges to the holder? Or special restrictions?
Could that be used by the mods to, e.g., create and enforce topic bans or thread bans? Can we have a Giraffe-style “Box” category where bad boys can be incarcerated using badges?
Nah, but it might be a good way to keep track, since you can often earn the same badge several times.
I’m picturing Thin Ice, Topic Ban, and Forum Ban badges.
There’s a New User of the Month badge that the software automatically hands out. The job runs once a month and calculates the number of posts each new member has made, plus the number of likes the user has received, plus the Trust Levels of who gave those likes. Unless someone calls attention to it, only the members (usually 2 per month) who receive it ever even know about it. It would take some work, but something like that might be set up for warnings.
The mods also have a Silence tool available to them now. It’s like a short-term suspension.
I just found out that the Demo site only allows me to make three consecutive replies, and then I can’t post any new replies in the same thread until somebody else posts something. (But it suggests that I should just edit one of my prior posts instead.) Is that a site-specific parameter that the site admin can set?
Another oddity: I replied to the immediately previous post, including a quote of the entire post, and the board automatically deleted the quote, and marked my new post as having been edited. I only figured out what happened there when I looked at the edit history and it said the quote had been automatically deleted.
While composing a reply, there’s a check mark that intermittently appears and disappears below the compose window, at the very bottom of the screen. WTF is that for?
Actually, I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t think people shouldn’t be making too many consecutive replies.
What, the editor has a grammar checker too?
I tried making a dummy test post consisting of:
and it said: Post must be at least 20 characters. Have you tried using the (heart thingy)?
Huh?
So I expanded that to:
and it said: Body seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?
Smart-ass message board! :smack:
Shit. Oh. Yeah.
If you’re quoting the most recent post in its entirety, the software removes your quote. Click on the orange pencil, and you should see that System edited your post. Forgot about that feature.
Admin needs to turn all that crap off ASAP. I think the minimum for the minimum character count is 5.
If I want to post a one- or two-character reply, I use It’s ASCII for backspace. It counts as 6 characters but shows up either as nothing at all or as a space, depending on your viewing system.
No, but the mods do get their very own yellow background when they’re posting mod stuff. Called Staff Coloring, which sounds a bit like a condition that ought to be looked at.
Okay, here’s a question that applies equally to our present board as well as the new one…
I think it was asked earlier: Something about whether we will attract new users.
But I think the real question should be: How do we attract new users in any case, new board or current board? Is this site advertised anywhere? Is it strictly word-of-mouth? How do people discover us?
I thought the main source of new users was Cecil’s columns, both on-line and on dead trees, that were widely seen, and made mention of this message board. With that gone, how does anybody find out about this site anymore?
I found it by researching stuff. I kept running across Google results for the SDMB, no matter what I was looking up, so I finally made an account. I’ve sent other people here, too, to help with their research (though, admittedly, I haven’t done so since the timeouts got really bad).
Hopefully, our Google standing will improve with the new software and servers.
I think there were questions earlier about how searches were going to work, regarding various search methods. Do you know how well Google searches work with Discourse sites?
It’s just the message board that’s moving. The rest of the site stays put. I’m assuming the link to the boards will still be there.