Quoting; was: FreeCAD Website Design

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bgoodr
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Enhancement Request: Direct selection quoting without scrolling overhead

Post by bgoodr »

Why:

Having to scroll down and hunt for a post that you were just reading, just to select text, after hitting reply is burdensome when you have to perform this operation frequently. Justified by others via:
vocx wrote: Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:34 am ... With that said, I agree with you that user B should not quote the entire post of A. He or she should quote only the part that is relevant to the reply. ...
NormandC wrote: Sat Oct 20, 2018 11:15 pm ... useless repeats that everybody needs to wade through....
Enhancement request:
bejant wrote: Mon Oct 22, 2018 2:04 am
... to quote only a portion, like I just did in this reply:
  • Click the Reply button,
  • Scroll down and swipe (select) the text you want to quote,
  • Go to the top of the post that has the text you just selected,
  • Click the button with the quote symbol at the upper right of that post.
That copies the text you selected onto the area where you compose your reply, along with some other data that will make up the text you quoted.
(The red highlighting is mine.)

The above is suboptimal for the user for frequent use, because:
  1. When first starting a post, I have to first reply and then scroll down for the post that I was just looking at.
  2. The current quote button, Image, quotes the entire post unconditionally, which always requires me to edit out irrelevant detail.
My suggestion: Change the existing quote button behaviour as follows:
  1. User scrolls down to a post that contains a part of text they desire to quote.
  2. User selects that text, which is some subset of the entire text.
  3. User clicks the quote button, Image.
  4. The web page notices that text is selected, and inserts the text into a quoted text into the reply. This should work even if the user has already started an existing reply, by inserting it into that existing reply wherever the cursor happens to be located (this I think is pre-existing behavior, but not the "page notices that text is selected" part which is the suggestion).
Not suggested: Add a new/different quote button as that seems to be both redundant with the existing button, which I'm implying should be a dwim button, since that seems to be more intuitive:
Kunda1 wrote: Mon Oct 22, 2018 5:07 am Is that supposed to be intuitive?
(Side-note: I would have thought there should be a forum about the forum behaviour itself, but I only found Open Discussion. If this is not the correct place to post this, then I request a moderator to move it accordingly).
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bgoodr
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Re: Quoting; was: FreeCAD Website Design

Post by bgoodr »

There may be technical reasons to say "no" to this request: Will it set an expectation to be working when I select only part of a "list" item? :roll:
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bejant
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Re: Quoting; was: FreeCAD Website Design

Post by bejant »

bgoodr wrote: Sat Feb 22, 2020 4:45 pm My suggestion: Change the existing quote button behaviour as follows:

User scrolls down to a post that contains a part of text they desire to quote.
User selects that text, which is some subset of the entire text.
User clicks the quote button, Image.
The web page notices that text is selected, and inserts the text into a quoted text into the reply. This should work even if the user has already started an existing reply, by inserting it into that existing reply wherever the cursor happens to be located (this I think is pre-existing behavior,
Yes, it is.


bgoodr wrote: Sat Feb 22, 2020 4:45 pm but not the "page notices that text is selected" part which is the suggestion).
Am I understanding correctly: you're suggesting that if a user hasn't started a reply and then selects some text from a post, and while that text is selected the user clicks the Quote button, the result is that a new reply is begun having only the selected text placed in the text input area? (I don't like when people reply by quoting an entire post and don't do it myself, except if the post I'm quoting is short.)

A bit off topic but, if you select text from one post and then click the Quote button from another post, the Quoted text is attributed to the wrong person (that is, the person who wrote the post that contains the mistakenly selected Quote button).

bgoodr wrote: Sat Feb 22, 2020 4:46 pm There may be technical reasons to say "no" to this request: Will it set an expectation to be working when I select only part of a "list" item?
At the top of this reply I quoted your list and the numbering was lost. It would be nice if the numbering was included both when quoting an entire list or when quoting only a numbered portion of the list. Not a big deal to me though because I could have just added the numbering manually.
chrisb
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Re: Quoting; was: FreeCAD Website Design

Post by chrisb »

This request seems to be rather something for the phpbb developers than for the FreeCAD forum.
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bgoodr
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Re: Quoting; was: FreeCAD Website Design

Post by bgoodr »

chrisb wrote: Sat Feb 22, 2020 11:07 pm This request seems to be rather something for the phpbb developers than for the FreeCAD forum.
Got it. I somehow I thought that whomever deployed phpBB, for the FreeCAD forum, had customized the quoting behavior. But it sounds like that was not the case. Thus, I will withdraw this request.
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