Four years of BBS

Here’s something I’d like to fix: when I do a blockquote reply like I just did here on Android, the composition window including keyboard takes up nearly all of the screen. I can just make out a narrow slice of the thread’s window behind the composition window (currently the height of eyebrows to upper-lip of your avatar, Jeff). Now, suppose I want to quote an additional chunk of your post? I minimize my comp window with the wee arrow in the upper right, then highlight more text…

Oh. Now it works. As recently as last week, highlighting and hitting quote would fail to do anything at all, and the quoted text wouldn’t be added to my post, though normal copypasta using Android’s tool worked. Was this a fixed Discourse bug, or just some temporary local weirdness on my end?

Anyway, glad it seems to be working now.

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Yes we fixed that issue, sorry about that.

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I have tagged you on a few OneBox issues in the past. It happens pretty regularly for me.

I didn’t know there was an app. Nice!

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Do you really not know if you would listen to someone offering advice in the way you would/do?

That sounds like how sometimes I think that some people are communicating irresponsibly while also expecting a degree of clear communication be afforded them. It sure feels draining when that happens, but I haven’t run the stats on if folks who confuse feelings with thoughts in their writing/vernacular are categorically those who leave me feeling drained.

Thanks for giving me something to think about!

I’ve looked but can’t seem to find it.

If you change a thread’s status from tracking or normal to muted, is there any way to unmute it?

Please fix this bug, too:

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Seconded! This is really annoying.

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It’s is really, really bad on long posts, because after the collapse we end up several comments into the thread and have to scroll up.

I came here to post that specific request.

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Also when you follow a notification that you’ve been replied to - how do you get back to where you were after you’ve read the reply?

(is there a better way than going back to the main list and then opening the thread again, to start at the “missed” posts?)

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isn’t this what the new floating “back” button does?

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It depends if the post in question is upstream or downstream of your last read position. If it is upstream (above) your last read position, then yes, that will work.

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BTW: is the quote function broken for anyone else? The “quote entire post” button works, but if I highlight part of a post and choose the quote option, it only quotes one word of the highlighted text. Using an iPad.

Heard of it, but can’t repro on my iPad, which I use… a lot. Anything unusual there? Are you using the default browser?

Third gen iPad (the first Retina one), iOS 9.3.5, no jailbreaking or any other weirdness, using Safari.

Hmm, can you update to iOS 10 and see if the problem persists?

Nope, looks like 9.3.5 is as high as it goes for a Pad this old. Checking for iOS updates gets me a message that I’m up to date.

yes. It just doesn’t work at all past the gray box showing up. I have the latest iOS on a 6S+ and use Opera (and its current).

Yes.

The one that hasn’t been posted to since @Khepra left after Hillary lost?

It should be pretty easy to disallow the reply to a specific post; the quote tag has four parameters: UserID, PostNum, TopicNum, and Full.

If (User.IsMutedBy(UserID) OR User.IsMutedBy(TopicNum.PostNum.GetPosterID())
{
    PostError(Muted);
}

Of course, that doesn’t protect blank [quote] tags or the > symbol, but at that point it’s no longer pointing to the original post, and the person who clicked “mute” is no longer getting the notification. And, at that point, it’s probably too much hassle to go further than that.

Although…

It’s never happened to me, but I remember reading that people have gotten errors when posting that “Your post is too similar to something you’ve already posted.” If Discourse already has that functionality, it might not be too hard to expand it to scan the contents of quote tags to see if it matches other posts by “IsMutedBy” users in the same topic. But that might be going too far.

muting

I don’t really see the use-case for muting, but if users here are feeling harassed, I think that it’s a good thing. This is never going to be a 100% “safe space,” but there should be a better way to deal with people inadvertently harming each other than exiling one or both of them from the community at large. As for accusations of conspiracy and enforced echo-chambers: for my part, in the Lounge, I’ve seen more consensus of “don’t flag” for loathsome opinions delivered in inoffensive ways than I have seen people coordinating to slay anything but the foulest trollies. I remember a couple of cases where people come back from bans, and there were a few Regulars being counselled by all of the others that no, we need to wait until they do something flag-worthy before we act.

I was on a Flag Strike for a while because of lack of feedback and collateral damage. I’ve seen some great things posted (a few of them posts of mine that I put a lot of time and effort into), that disappeared for no good reason.

I’ve had a long, heart-rending post in a discussion about mental illness, quoting multiple users and advancing multiple threads, deleted because a small part of one thread was a person repeatedly calling me crazy for being sensitive about calling people “crazy” (due to a disclosed family history of mental illness) and I’d flagged that because it was obvious, deliberate provocation directed at me.

I had a defense of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” deleted (it was the root of the ones deleted, so probably not collateral damage), with absolutely no feedback as to what lines it had crossed. Was I being insensitive? Provocative? Trivializing a sensitive issue? Or was my opinion about that song just at odds with the opinion of the mod who deleted it? I’ve read and re-read the post in question and I don’t know.

Without knowing which lines I crossed, I have no idea how to alter my future behaviour. When the same subject came up again a few weeks later, I largely recused myself and my opinions from the thread, not because I’d been given a point of view to re-examine my actions from (I hadn’t), but because, like the proverbial cat who sat on a hot element, I’d been burned once, and yes, I’ll never sit on a hot element again, but I’ll also never sit on a cool one.

My Flag Strike is over, but I’m still flag-shy. The shit that started showing up after the election convinced me that I need to act sometimes, but I’ll still only act in the worst cases. And that will continue to be the case until flagging has predictable consequences and I don’t feel it will risk ripping out chunks of the productive discussion along with the driving trollies.

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I’m starting to really like this. Thanks, Jeff. :slight_smile:

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If something important to you gets deleted because of a partial text, download all your posts from your user page, grab the text, and repost the edited version. Not exactly easy but I just want to point out nothing you post is gone forever.

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