So since the new design is supposed to be discussion friendly, from what I’ve seen in the discussion about “10 characters”, it’d be nice to add some intuitiveness to this site when it comes to quoting/replying to people. Most of the forums I visit use XenForo or VBulliten software. And they all allow multi-quoting. And all you need to do to quote someone is hit the “+Quote” button and it saves all of them for you to use when you finally reply. Or you can hit the “Reply” button and it automatically posts the persons message in your reply.
What we have here on this forum, to be honest, is a mess. Look at this series, which is not an isolated instance of this happening.
These kind of make Moonman out to look like a crazy person, not judging Moonman , all of these replies, you have to go and click on every single reply to figure out what is being talked about. It’d be nice to have the reply automatically show what is being replied to, and have the option to add multiple replied to a single “reply”.
We’re planning to add a feature that blocks multiple sequential replies from the same poster, with a just-in-time reminder to quote and combine replies.
I don’t think quoting is particularly difficult if you’ve ever selected, copied and pasted text at any time on a computer:
To me this is more of a “reminder” and “lead the horse to water” kind of thing.
The reply button is very convenient, yet doesn’t post what they’re replying to, it adds the reply as something you have to click on to find out what they’re replying to. Which in most replies I tend to ignore, skip through, until I get to the next post. Can’t imagine I’m the only one.
Not copy and paste, but “quote”. Previous software here, and nearly every other forum on the internet have a “quote” button that is used, and that allows for a quick quote, and even multiple quote option.
The way the “Reply” function is, as shown above, is kind of an annoying way to have a conversation. And if the only way to combat something like that happening in the future is to add a time limit, that will just start to frustrate people.
I think that having an option to multi-quote, or multi-reply, would be extremely useful, and the fact that pretty much all forum software has this option I think I’m in the majority with this thought.
I’d also note the behavior you’re describing is kinda specific to some users in my experience. Not just here but elsewhere as well. Which is why the just in time reminder should be helpful.
It’s not that they don’t know select/copy/paste, it’s the fact that most forum software has a feature for multiple quotes within a reply that is very obvious to use. The discourse developers seem bent on bending the world to their own view of the world and consider themselves the arbiters of all that is good.
In 2003 all things worked better, I was there! Yep and multi quote existed. Really!
Seriously, I did figure out how to multi quote but not for several weeks. After using other formats I was used to quote buttons and wasn’t aware of the copy paste method in discourse. It works fine for me now but I didn’t initially find it intuitive.
I know how to copy and paste and how to use it on this forum to quote people. But, if I’m understanding you correctly, since we can only quote one person at a time, if we haven’t logged in for a while and we check in and want to reply to multiple folks in the same thread, since we can’t do it at once, we’ll have to do it separately; but, we’ll also have to wait a specific amount of time between posts or be warned…on a discussion forum…we’ll be warned for discussing…on a discussion forum.
The limit on multiple sequential replies from the same user is now in and deployed here (and technically everywhere since it is a new default on feature for Discourse). Based on default settings, attempting to post a fourth sequential reply to the same topic will be blocked, like so:
Topic started by user A
Post by user B
Post by user C
Post by user C
Post by user C
(Another post attempt by user C will be prevented, with an educational message)
Sorry, off by one error. My bad. I don’t know why the default is 2 but we end up with 4, I need to get her to change that. I’ve edited my post above to make it correct:
, all of these replies, you have to go and click on every single reply to figure out what is being talked about. It’d be nice to have the reply automatically show what is being replied to, and have the option to add multiple replied to a single “reply”.
Yep and multi quote existed. Really!