When viewing threads often people quote and reply to someone above, unfortunately the way this forum controls that is to not include the original text. So you see someone replying to someone else without knowing what they’re responding too exactly, it messes with the flow of the thread and the only apparent way to see what they’re quoting is to click the icon top right of the post, which sends you to the quoted post but then you have to scroll back down to the bottom again to carry on where you left off reading.
It would be far better, as every other forum has it, to include the quoted text in the post of the person responding.
I’d say the quoting on this forum is cleaner than on old forums, where you often ended up with quotes inside quotes. In the end 60% of the topic length is quotes..
Clicking the quote (for me at least) does not take me back to the post, instead just shows the quote just above the post where you clicked it.
As others have stated before me, there is a quoting function in the forums. The only catch is you need to know that it’s there. You have to highlight the text you want to quote, and a “quote” button appears. (Alternatively, you can manually write the markup, yourself. But highlighting is easier!)
Does this satisfy what you are looking for?
By the way, if you use the hashtag forum-feedback, the moderators will see any feedback you have about the forums.
Yeah i know how it works and how to quote, my point is the outcome is messy and not like regular forums where it works just fine.
It seems this forum software is trying to reinvent the Forum, but it’s - IMO - no better than other more common form software, this Quoting system is just one of a few backward points for me.
Agreed. I’ve also noticed that if I quote just 2 or more hiearachy (even if small amount of text) the “System” account automatically removes my quotes from the reply. You can see that it was removed by system automatically if you subsequently edit your post it will show it at the top of the edit window.
I’ll agree that it’s different, and it took me a bit to realize it was even a feature, but what exactly is messy about it?
I’d say it’s actually really clean; you simply select what you want, and click ‘Quote’. With other forums, you typically have to quote a whole post, then edit it down to just what you want. That often leads to people removing important bits and borking the whole markup, or creating quotes attributed to other people.
Plus, like Tjoeker said, it cuts down significantly on people mindlessly quote-replying and creating massive posts of nested quotes… simply so they can say “^ This!” to the last person.
Discourse is a very opinionated piece of forum software. It takes advantage of new technologies that didn’t exist when many of these other forums were first invented. It also tries to do things in a more modern way. Because of this, the forum software can be a bit of a culture shock for some users, but once you get the hang of it, it is way easier to use.
With all of that said, the quote and reply system is a core function, we cannot alter the way it functions. Because of this, I don’t want to tie up peoples votes, but I am more than happy to keep this discussion open, so I am going to move it to #community:general-discussion-feedback.
I think the forum works well, and the “Quote” tool is very useful for pinpointing what is being answered in what might be a large post.
The only time it goes wrong is when someone replies to a post, but clicks the general “Reply” button at the end of the list rather than the reply button associated with the post they are answering. Sometimes there are several posts between the two posts (original and reply), and it’s not obvious which post is being answered. This is not a fault of the system but it is down to users learning the best practice.
I don’t know if the button at the end of the list could be changed to “Add Post”, to make it clearer?
aha-erlebnis