Why, why, why does quoting fail every so often? That is, I quote a message, or multi-quote, and nothing shows up in the edit window? Once it occurs, it is persistent for some time, through browser restart and even through logout/login. It sometimes is even limited to a single sub-forum, which is really weird behavior.
Is there a fix other than switching browsers? (I have a persistent quote failure right now in FF; had to switch to Chrome to Make a Few Points.)
Is there a known cause, something that can be tweaked under Mozilla to prevent it, or some digital form of percussive maintenance that will fix it?
I used to have the problem intermittently but over a lengthy duration on multiple computers when using IE. I have not encountered the problem running Chrome. Chrome has other issues that are annoying - primarily no WYSIWYG - but it’s what I’m currently running.
Regular quote just works by linking to a URL that contains the post number. The server is then responsible for putting the actual into the HTML it sends back to the user, putting it in a textarea tag. And I can find no reported bugs about Firefox or Chrome not properly handling the text within textarea tag, and it’s a feature that’s been around for ages.
In other words, with plain quote, I can’t see how the problem could be client side. It would have to be a problem on the server.
Multiquote is a different beast. It saves the selected post number to a cookie using JavaScript. That could conceivably be a local problem, if the cookie isn’t getting set or can’t be read.
Right. With almost 12,000 posts, I haven’t figured out how to use the quote function. Is there an online course?
I click QUOTE (or a few multiquote buttons, then QUOTE), and the message editor pops up blank. No matter how many times I back out, even restart the browser. Then it mysteriously goes away a bit later, and sometimes only seems to affect one subforum and not another.
[QUOTE=Some Doper Calling Hisself Canadjun]
Unless I am misunderstanding you, that doesn’t make sense, since I am able to edit the text within a quote.
[/QUOTE]
The quote function just pulls the text from the quoted message and wraps it in QUOTE brackets. Nothing more, nothing less. The only link is the tiny arrow button that will take you to the quoted message… but it is just a link, not a live import of the quote material. You can delete that link (and the poster’s name) if you like. Won’t change the essentially dead text quoted.
I did misunderstand what BigT was saying. I thought at first that he was saying that quoted text (the actual stuff you see when you’ve finished) was just a link, rather than the quote button being a link. Sorry!
Do you use Adblock? I can’t see how that would cause your problem, but it might be worth a try to disable it. Sometimes Adblock gets a bit funky on me.
I will say that I almost always use multiquote now, even if I’m only quoting one post. So it’s possible my problems were related to the cookie issue or something.
In my case it created a post with just **— Gaudere’s Law ** quoted, which is what I expected. Was yours really blank or did it have that text in it? (I assume you know, but in case you don’t, you can’t nest quotes automatically; you have to do some code fiddling to do that).
I find that quotes (both multi and regular) work consistently if I use the “Post Reply” button to begin my post. If I just start typing in the Quick Reply box, or use “Post Quick Reply” to enter it, then regular quotes will sometimes work, and multi-quotes will never work.
As long as I hit “Post Reply” to enter the quotes before I start typing my own response, it’s golden. Does that fit your pattern AB?
The type box was empty, as it was when I tried quoting your post in this one.
And when I previewed this post, the type box came up blank, so I had to copy it from the preview and paste that in the type box after fixing the copied quote and smiley in a word processor; an old problem with at least two threads discussing it, the first dating back at least a year.
