Good point. If page refresh doesn’t cure it, then closing all browsers / tabs and starting afresh does. Or at least always has so far.
My use of the dope often ends up with dozens or a hundred tabs created and destroyed and created and destroyed and …
Something eventually goes Urrrk inside and then the plus is borked until I restart the browser.
Thanks for the suggestions everyone, but none of this seems to help on my iPad. I have tried three different browsers, quit and relaunched them, refreshed the page, logged out and back in, etc. I have yet to get the plus sign to work even once.
What I do have is an icon with a quote symbol that produces a blockquote that I’ve never used (and don’t know what it does), along with an upload function that is apparently nonfunctional here, and a plus sign that doesn’t work. I’d much rather have my quote bubble back.
I’m now seeing something on my Win10 + Edge about like you are.
The plus simply doesn’t work. Almost 100% of the time. Today.
The plus sign works fine for me just like always, Win 7 with Edge and Firefox.
I know you know this, but others might not …
Something that does happen is the fine folks at Discourse push out a change to a script. Just before that all of us have the old version cached. As each of our caches later age out whenever they happen to, the old gets replaced by the new. And then we each start experiencing the new behavior at that time.
The new behavior might be a new bug or it might be a new bug fix.
Same for me.
Safari on iPhone 16 Pro Max.
Just tried, works fine on my Chrome on Android. But not on my other device. I’ll fiddle w caches, etc., later.
I don’t think it’s a cache issue. The plus thingie works fine both on Edge and Firefox, and I haven’t used Firefox to access the SDMB for a very long time. In fact I hardly use Firefox at all. So when I started up Firefox to check, it was a brand new fresh session. It also works fine with Firefox on Android. Why it’s failing on some platforms I have absolutely no idea.
But moving the quote bubble to a separate menu seems like a bad idea. For some reason Discourse designers seem to dislike the idea of quoting entire posts.
Perhaps.
But there are 6 or 10 options under that dropdown, none of which are accessible in any way if the dropdown doesn’t drop on cue.
I care about all of them, not just the top one.
Just tried on my iPhone 16 Pro with Safari, and the plus sign works just fine. So that’s what you guys are talking about!
Anyway, I see a bunch of options when you click on the plus sign, the first of which is my long-lost “Quote whole post” option, as well as bulleted and numbered lists, a blur spoiler option, etc. Very nice!
But it still doesn’t work on my iPad. At all. Maybe I’ll try rebooting it. Guess what, rebooting did the trick! It works on my iPad now too. 
P.S. Note that closing my browser did not help. I had to reboot my iPad entirely. The only other time I’ve had to do this (i.e. reboot) is to force my iPad to reload all of the icons for bookmarks in Safari. Sometimes they stop loading and are all a similar, featureless gray icon, which makes it really hard to find a bookmark from a field of near-identical gray icons. The only thing that fixes this is to reboot my iPad.
Glad to hear your problem is fixed! There’s a recurring meme on the British sitcom The IT Crowd where every time Roy gets an IT support call on the phone, his standard line is “have you tried turning it off and on again?” It’s amazing how successful you can be in IT support with just that one remedy! 
Yes, I should have thought of that sooner. I didn’t think a minor glitch in Discourse would be helped by a reboot, but there you go.
And thanks for reminding me about that show! I saw a single episode for the first time in March, and thought it was really funny.
I had a thing like this today: it’s a recurring* glitch in Word for Mac. Sometimes it will just stop allowing you to highlight text for copy/paste, etc. Actually, it does select the text, but the visual feedback no longer works. You actually have to restart the Mac in order to get this function back!
*Recurring but only a couple times a year or so.
At this point I apologize to customers for even asking if they’ve rebooted, because it’s such a cliche, but honestly I’d say a very large proportion of the issues I deal with on a daily basis are fixed with reboots.
This does however get complicated when you’re talking about a mobile device. If you “turn off” many mobile devices, they are actually just going into a sleep mode. A true reboot often requires going through settings or doing a complicated set of button presses (particularly for an Apple device). So, it’s not as simple as it would be on a PC.
May I recommend the first episode of Season 2, “The Work Outing”, as the best single episode of the entire series!
List of The IT Crowd episodes - Wikipedia
And a new experience for those of us long accustomed to real computers. My Android tablet will power off if I just hold the power button down long enough, which I sometimes do accidentally when just trying to get it to sleep, so I’m glad it has a “are you sure?” popup.
But as for my phone, I don’t even know how to turn it completely off. I’d have to go through a bunch of menus.
On Apple, force-closing everything is at least an app-boot if not an OS-boot.
Two things to consider when it comes to mobile devices that are generally less of an issue on a laptop or desktop is RAM and total memory. Sometimes (and not saying it is the case here) you have too many things left open, leaving you short on available memory which can cause a wide range of unassociated glitches. This is one of the reasons a reboot will often fix intermittent but otherwise apparently unlinked issues.
But especially for Apple products, which historically ship with less storage than ideal considering the size of iOS and associated Apps, they can get really squirrelly when your remaining storage is down to 5-10% or less. That used to be my bane in phone tech support back in the day, because someone would buy a model with the minimal available storage, and find a year later it wasn’t working right, only to find that after a years worth of updates and pics they had fundamentally no storage left.
So it’s worthwhile every month or so to go to settings and check how much on-phone storage you have left. And if it’s under 10% (ballpark) to purge or offload unneeded files/apps/photos.
The amount of available storage (as opposed to RAM) can also affect behaviour in strange ways. On my Amazon Fire tablet, the Firefox browser in particular (which is a bit buggy to begin with) starts exhibiting weird symptoms like missing icons if the amount of available internal storage falls much below 1 GB. No error messages, it just starts to go nuts. Deleting stuff to free up space gets it working properly again. Looks like really bad software design somewhere (Firefox, OS, or both) that handles anything approaching edge cases very poorly.
but it collapses more on phones if necessary.
they could not collapse things, but ux design can often deliberately make things take a bit longer to use to try and discourage said use.
when I get around to it, I’ll probably restore the button in my user script as it is indeed annoying to me.