Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)

Nao

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Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« on September 12th, 2010, 04:47 PM »
Okay, you know what -- QUOTES ARE WAY UNDERUSED.

People don't multi-quote enough. People don't know the pleasure of replying everything line by line.
You know what? Because people use the Quote bbc button and it's so complicated.
Power-quoters like me, and perhaps Pete, do it manually. Quote message... Okay, focus on message, ctrl+end, ctrl+shift+left arrow until I select the entire [/quote], ctrl+c, ctrl+home (I use ctrl a lot, at this point...), go to end of the quote I want to reply to, ctrl+v, enter, enter, type answer... Enter, enter, ctrl+v, right arrow, del (this effectively turns it into an opening quote), go to end of the quote, keep doing it that way...

Now, you can try it if you never did. It works and, well, I don't see a better way of doing it quickly.

...
Until today.
I remembered these freaking' annoying e-mails.
Which were so easy to reply to, because they already were entirely quoted.

> Hello, world.
> Reply to this.
> Just below.

See? It's easy.

> More quotes.

---------------> Now what? Why can't we do that for Wedge?
That's the idea, really.

Quote message.
Show message. Instead of showing it inside a large quote tag, turn it into a post with limited width, add automatic carriage returns, and *add > signs in front of each line*.
Now, the user can reply like on any e-mail they may want to quote...
And then, when they hit the Send button, that's where the magic is supposed to be applied: we turn back this post into a properly quoted post. I don't know exactly how, but we can discuss it. Basically, it's simply about concatenating all lines with a starting ">" into a single quote. Special cases like code tags should be accounted for (we have to deal with them as a single block). We could keep a copy of the quoted post in memory, and compare it with the new post, and thus do some sort of diff on it -- you know, like Wikipedia. And then we quote everything that was inside the earlier post, and only that.

It could be exciting... Because it's something that actually talks to e-mail users. There are a few, I've heard. :whistle:

Arantor

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Re: Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« Reply #1, on September 12th, 2010, 05:03 PM »
Quote
People don't multi-quote enough. People don't know the pleasure of replying everything line by line.
You know what? Because people use the Quote bbc button and it's so complicated.
Click+hold, drag, Ctrl-C, click, [quote], Ctrl-V, [/quote] hahahaah

Yes, it's... awkward. It's why so many people just hit quote then reply to the message as a whole.

Funny you should mention this, because this came up in SimpleDesk's dev cycle and for the same reason - folks that were used to email wouldn't like the reply-with-quote, and I kind of mulled it over and figured it'd be awesome to do but could never figure out how to make it work sanely for the forum users (the strong SMF background)

I love the idea, though I'm concerned it might be a paradigm shift too far for some folks... hmm.
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MultiformeIngegno

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Re: Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« Reply #2, on September 12th, 2010, 06:07 PM »
I like the idea!!!! Just, what if you use ">" to start a sentence in your post but you don't want it to be converted in a quote..?
What about a more complex system where you can add the quotes you want in your post and then in the editor (at the left of the box) you have lines of different colours at the left of each quote? :)

Arantor

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Nao

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Re: Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« Reply #4, on September 12th, 2010, 09:16 PM »
Quote from Arantor on September 12th, 2010, 05:03 PM
Quote
People don't multi-quote enough. People don't know the pleasure of replying everything line by line.
You know what? Because people use the Quote bbc button and it's so complicated.
Click+hold, drag, Ctrl-C, click, [quote], Ctrl-V, [/quote] hahahaah
I don't know about that... It doesn't work in Opera, at least.
Quote
Funny you should mention this, because this came up in SimpleDesk's dev cycle and for the same reason - folks that were used to email wouldn't like the reply-with-quote, and I kind of mulled it over and figured it'd be awesome to do but could never figure out how to make it work sanely for the forum users (the strong SMF background)

I love the idea, though I'm concerned it might be a paradigm shift too far for some folks... hmm.
Oh, I'm pretty positive people will learn quickly about the new system.

As for messages starting with a ">"... Yes, people could simply add an extra space to make it a non-quote.

Arantor

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Re: Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« Reply #5, on September 12th, 2010, 10:37 PM »
Quote
I don't know about that... It doesn't work in Opera, at least.
Opera can't manage selecting text, copying it to the clipboard, then holding it while you type stuff, ready to paste it? Now I remember why I never use it :P

It's a paradigm shift and no mistake. So was SimpleDesk's permissions, and because we're not limiting ourselves to sticking to the ways it's done now, I think it has a decent shot at dealing with the problem.

spuds

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Re: Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« Reply #6, on September 12th, 2010, 11:47 PM »
Or how about some javascript magic so that when you are in the post screen when you mouse over the topic summary with a key press you can start / stop text selection and have it be inserted in to your reply inside the quote blocks for ya .....

Arantor

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Re: Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« Reply #7, on September 12th, 2010, 11:50 PM »
Keep 'em coming.

I'll be honest, right now I'm not really reading a lot here, I'm reading up on the 3rd party editor I'm looking at using, and playing around with integration.

If it works the way I'm hoping it will, we get to dump the WYSIWTF editor that much sooner.

(I'm looking at CK Editor. I believe I can integrate it better into how the forum works without compromising the sorts of things we have already.)

hadesflames

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Re: Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« Reply #8, on September 14th, 2010, 04:24 AM »
Depending on the size of the message, I may answer it all at once, or break up the quote. If it's like just one paragraph, I'm not going to bother quoting every individual sentence...If it's a monster of a post like something Pete would post, then I'd quote individual points to get across my ideas on these individual points.

Arantor

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Nao

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Arantor

  • As powerful as possible, as complex as necessary.
  • Posts: 14,278

Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
  • Posts: 16,079
Re: Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« Reply #13, on November 30th, 2010, 10:54 PM »
Quote from Bloc on October 3rd, 2010, 11:56 AM
The multi-quoting sounds fascinating..but will it be an issue with widths? I mean, different people will have different set of lines, depending on what width they have in their browser.
I'm thinking it *could* be done by Javascript... We retrieve the width of the textarea... And then we format the quoted text in a way that they never go above 80% of that width or something. Well, it may be easier said than done... Width issues are the #3 reason why I haven't implemented this yet. (#2 being not having enough time to work on everything, and #1 being that I really meant #2, not #3.)
Re: Another life-changing fantastic idea for quotes! (Bit silly, too.)
« Reply #14, on March 9th, 2011, 11:24 PM »
Spent the better part of the day thinking of implementations for this...
Especially after I did something similar in Class-CSS.php (nested rules), I thought it'd be easy.

Well... It isn't. The basics work, I tested and everything. But because I tested, I also found many, many flaws.
For instance, how do we differentiate between a newline, and a line that is simply too long and must be split over two lines? How do we make sure lines don't get longer than the available textarea width? How do we treat anything that is between tags and split over several lines? (e.g. if you have a link with a description that takes over two lines, should we cut the line at all, or close the link at the end of the first line and reopen the same link automatically at the beginning of the next one? Things like that...)

Every time I think of a workaround for a problem, I discover another weakness somewhere else.
So, basically -- it's pretty hard to have both a BBCode system, and an e-mail style quote system.

Any thoughts...? Going to bed. Maybe I'll be more capable of thinking tomorrow.