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Vanilla 2.8 rich editor: nested quotes, inline comment in quotes, and mark all read

Hi,

my users keep asking me about the above features. "Mark all read" seems to have disappeared entirely, whereas quoting has become quite cumbersome and inconvenient, especially when threads with arguments on religious and political issues grow exponentially in size with every new post.

I'm aware of the workaround.

@user1 said:

quote 1


@user2 said:

quote 2


Now for a post with short to medium length that works okay. But a long post, to which three or four people have already contributed, building the above structure becomes a bit complicated, whereas before it was possible to just quote the entire post, just write in between the lines, and the quotes wold be attributed the the appropriate user automatically.

>> @user1 said:

>> quote 1

> @user2 said:

> quote 2

user3's response goes here


Bottom line: inline quotes are a feature greatly missed in the otherwise quite awesome new editor

Comments

  • R_JR_J Ex-Fanboy Munich Admin

    I second this: in nearly 100% of all the times I like to quote something, I do not want to quote the complete post but only a few words/lines to stress that or to answer that.

    While I can format any paragraph as a quote, it still misses the feature that the user that I'm quoting is included/gets notified.

    It would be nice if the way quoting works will become more flexible again.

  • charrondevcharrondev Developer Lead (PHP, JS) Montreal Vanilla Staff
    edited February 2019

    The current Rich Editor quoting did not get 100% of the time I had hoped to give it. There a few enhancements I’d like to give it.

    I’d like to preserve the style of a quote. I do like that a quote is essentially an embedded comment or post. This gives a bit more authority to it (knowledge that it likely wasn’t tampered with or missattributed). With that in mind:

    • Nested quotes aren’t a great experience on mobile. Once you start nesting they become really difficult to follow. I think a large amount of what quotes get used for would be better implemented as light threading (probably a single level of depth a la stack exchange).
    • I'd like to add a way to select which part of the comment/discussion you’d like to quote through explicit UI rather than requiring deletion of parts you don’t want.
    • Some tooltip while selecting another user’s text would be 1 good method of quoting a partial item. Some UI on the quote embed itself would compliment it nicely.
    • There’s currently some miscalculation that can occur with certain themes about what makes a quote collapsible or not. My feeling is a quote should always be expandable to the full size without needing to change pages to the original comment.
  • I agree that it would be nice if quotes were more flexible.

    @charrondev, I agree with you on the nested quotes thought. This is regarding something more than quotes, but thought it'd be interesting to mention: I find it interesting how Discourse handles replies referencing other replies, which seems to be a tweakable feature, where you can make it so that replies show up in the flat level with a quote and a link back to the referenced reply--from there, there is a "Replies" drop-down that simulates threading.

    When you make a quote with the new Rich Editor, and the referenced post were edited after the fact, would the contents of the quote be updated, or does it actually copy the text into the new comment as we're familiar with?

    Add Pages to Vanilla with the Basic Pages app

  • charrondevcharrondev Developer Lead (PHP, JS) Montreal Vanilla Staff

    We made the decision to copy the content when inserted. I don’t like the idea of a comment being able to have its content changed without the permission of the author. Quotes provide a good to way to take a “snapshot”. If the author later updates their post this will not update the content of a quote. The same goes for our site embed. The summary/title of the embedded image are copied.

    This also happens to be better from a performance standpoint so win/win?

  • sorry but i really don't understand your point of view, more often than not people respond only to part of what soemone said or differently to several points someone mentioned. being able to edit a quote allow for much clearer formating of the response.

    i hope others will chime in and you'll reconsider, this is really counterproductive!

  • charrondevcharrondev Developer Lead (PHP, JS) Montreal Vanilla Staff

    @gimmel did you read my post? I’d like to be able to implement some way of narrowing down the quoted portion. I just want to always maintain some way to view the original.

  • 👍️

    What will happen when the original text is changed after it has been quoted?

  • charrondevcharrondev Developer Lead (PHP, JS) Montreal Vanilla Staff

    If you quote something no one else can change the content of your post except you or a user with the comments.edit permission.

  • i think a highlight partial text to quote partial text would be great.

    i'd also like to be able to <small> text for notes, or whatever.

    <small>(and use <img> tags for hotlinking heh)</small>

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