Today I was made aware that hyperlink quote boxes appear to some people with all the text underlined. Thanks to Bayard, running coach, raventhief, and Frodo for explaining what y’all are seeing.
I decided to start a thread here to try and ascertain the extent of this discrepancy rather than hijack the Trump Clusterfuck thread.
I had no idea that some browsers displayed this way. There have been a handful of ATMB threads from people expressing surprise that it was even possible to make a quote box into a hyperlink and I figured that they (and everyone else) saw the same thing I did. I don’t recall anyone in any of those threads indicating that they saw all of the text underlined.
In Safari, a hyperlink quote box (HLQB) has four black-lined sides, like this. A regular quote box has a black-lined top and left side and grey-lined bottom and right, like this. Both OS Safari and iOS Safari display the same.
Are all of y’all using Chrome, or just Frodo?
Not sure what to say about Tapatalk; I understand it’s a fairly broken piece of software. Do links that do not include the quote box work fine on Tapatalk?
I see occasional fully-hyperlinked quotes; I have just assumed it was a copy-and-paste error that put the hyperlink code outside the quotebox code. Do you have a link to a thread that has one in it?
I asked in the Trump thread and it sounds like people are only seeing this with your links, which then leads to the question, what are you doing differently? Do you code the quotes or use the quote function? If you quote it, could you share your work?
I code everything by hand; I find the shortcuts provided by the message board more cumbersome than simply coding as I go (although I do screw up with typos; “fixed coding” is my most frequent reason for editing a post).
To create a HLQB I simply type [ url= link ] some text and then [ quote ] this would be the quoted text [ /quote ][ /url ]. Spaces are added to prevent it from being real code. This encapsulates both plain text and the quote box within the [ url= ] parameter.
Oh, yeah. Those always appear with underlines on both Chrome and Firefox. I’ve seen you do them before. There was one point when they didn’t show underlines, but that was a long time ago.
I don’t mind them in the slightest, though I don’t use them. I generally avoid using the quote tag for external quotations, in case someone wants to easily quote the external text. I just use the indent tags. And since I specify the source in the text leading or following the quote, I usually have an easy place to link.
It comes out underlined for me on Chrome. It’s a bit annoying. Whenever I see a quote box with underlined link text, I always know who posted it without having to look at the poster’s name.
I checked it in three browsers on my Android phone. I don’t see lines in the stock LG browser. I see them in Chrome and Rocket browser. They don’t bother me. I prefer Rocket browser because it completely kills all ads on the Dope.
I see it in IE and Chrome on Windows 10. It doesn’t bother me one way or the other. It only slightly annoys me when the coding gets all jacked up in Tapatalk (which I use on my android phone).
ETA: Quote boxes generally display fine for me in Tapatalk. It’s just the combo quote and link style that gets goobed up. In general, I find Tapatalk reasonably good for reading and quick posting.
If you stop including the quote in the the url parameters, then the display issue should stop. Since it’s only working correctly in one browser, this seems like a logical fix. Just attribute your source (as you are already doing), and then list your quote(s) separately.
Um. Thanks for this, Sunny. You may be surprised to learn that I had already surmised that if I didn’t code the quote box as a link that the text contained therein would not show up underlined in some browsers.
Sincere thanks to everyone for describing what they are seeing. I curtailed my use of quote boxes as hyperlinks when it became apparent that it was possible or even likely that a good percentage of the board was seeing them displayed in such an unwieldy manner. The whole point of doing it was to make links easier to click on while being unobtrusive. Once it was pointed out that they were, in fact, obtrusive, I abandoned the practice.
That’s my thoughts on it as well. I rarely look at usernames as I’m reading, but know a few people’s posting styles, this being one of them. As for being annoying. It’s mild at best. I tend to move my cursor down the screen as I’m reading to keep my place and when the entire quote lights up, well, that’s Snowboarder. Also, what really makes it stand out is that it’s just the underline that’s a hyperlink so if you mouseover any part of it the underline turns red and the text stays black. Even stranger, it’s all disconnected. In a post like the one you linked to, I can put my mouse over the very first top line “Jared Kusher’s…” and that whole line plus the underline in both quotes all turns red. It’s almost disconcerting, in a Geocites kind of way.
But as far as annoying, like I said, mild at best. I get more annoyed when people recode the quotes to say Quoth instead. That annoys me.
