I’ve got a good repro on our community forum and have taken it to the rest of the team. I’ll get back to you as soon as I have news!
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Turns out this is iOS “magic” based on “tapping near a previous tap”. So the fix and reproduction is… complex.
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I’m glad you’re at least getting to the bottom of it. It’s incredibly aggravating. Is this new to iOS 15 Safari? Is there some way to opt out of this behavior?
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We are working on it, but it’s quite complex because… well, what I described is complex 
Workaround for now is to make sure you are tapping in very different areas on the screen when you tap. 🤷
Aside time:
Something else that’s aggravating is that iOS’s text correction is really, really broken on Discourse’s text entry for posts. It seems like the more a post is edited or modified at any one time, the worse it gets until it basically becomes usable.
It starts suggesting garbage text, or no suggestions at all. Often times tapping a suggestion to fix text doesn’t actually apply. This isn’t new to iOS 15 but it’s no less irritating and leads to a really poor mobile experience.
Finally - any progress on fixing the broken gif picker? It’s a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things but it’s an uncharacteristic lack of polish.
ETA here’s an example of the weird text substitution behavior:
I’m not sure – I turned off iOS text suggester years ago as it was so very annoying, and haven’t looked back since.
In the meantime, be sure your “taps” are in very different locations on the page to avoid this behavior for now.
Also, I pretty much exclusively use the native OS emoji pickers these days, on Windows, on Chromebook, on Android, and on iOS.
Workaround doesn’t seem to work well. I highlighted this text from your post:
Workaround for now is to make sure you are tapping in very different areas on the screen when you tap.
And the quote pop up appeared on the right side of my screen. I tapped on the far left side of the screen and then tapped on the quote bottom on the far right of the screen. It still didn’t quote the text.
Here’s a picture that might make things clearer:
“R” is where I removed my finger from the screen. T1 is my first tap, T2 is my second tap. I would think going nearly from one side of the screen to the other would be adequate but it’s not. If I tap anywhere else, it makes the quote button go away.
Easier said than done. Tapping too far out of the way makes the quote button disappear or has other unexpected behavior.
I think per our analysis it has to be more than 50-100px away from the last tap location. It’s a very weird thing.
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One thing I found is if I tap in the highlighted text 2 or 3 times somewhat slowly before tapping quote that it seems to work even if it’s in that arbitrary zone of brokenness. I’ll try to fine tune this some more.
ETA looks like it needs to be 3 slow taps. Also it looks like that 50-100px zone is more important vertically than horizontally. This is so damn irritating.
For those of us who do use this, is there anything I can do to get more info on this so it can be fixed? I have not seen this behavior anywhere else with text entry on iOS other than on Discourse message boards.
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We’re definitely working on it! Thank you for your patience and assistance, it is indeed a very frustrating one.
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I believe the iOS quick quote bug should be resolved now 
See what you think.
I’m extremely confident that’s an iOS issue, not a Discourse issue. It sounds like incorrect words were accidentally stored in your phone’s predictive text database. This article might give you some ideas: How to Remove Words from iPhone Predictive Text: 3 Fixes (2023)
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Thanks! I’ll give it a few days and report back.
I don’t think it’s this - these words start appearing randomly and are directly related to the text I’m entering text for a post on Discourse websites. It’s strange in that the more I work on a post, the more unpredictable and broken it gets. I’ve only ever seen this phenomenon on Discourse sites which makes me wonder if there’s something weird in the JavaScript that backs the text entry.
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Quote function is exhibiting odd expansion behavior now. Selecting one word by press and hold works but as soon as the selection handles are dragged to expand the quote the selection box jumps multiple lines up or down.
This:
To this:
Weird.
Any chances you could provide us with a screen recording of this issue?
We can’t seem to reproduce this 
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Here you go:
Quote expansion was lateral. Updated last PM to iOS 15.2.1.
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So you were trying to select “screen” as well?
Nope. Just the text. Selecting the GUI was an odd artifact for sure.
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I was trying to understand what you meant by “lateral expansion”? It’s not 100% clear from the recording.
Were you trying to add the word “screen” to the selection?
Note how everything up to the header suddenly got selected. I’ve seen this happen before but not recently.
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Tap, hold to select word, pull highlight handle laterally to select additional text to the right or left, boom! odd selection anomaly.
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