Discussion
The quoting feature is dead handy, but it is a little too easy to build up long messages just from a few people quoting replies to replies to replies. It needs some effort to prune the quotes out to stop them taking over the page, and it seems that people often can't be bothered. Would it be possible to automate this somehow? Here are a couple of ideas:
* When a long paragraph is quoted, only the first sentence or so are extracted and retained in the quote.
* When a post containing quotes is quoted, nested quotes beyond a certain depth (two or three, perhaps) get stripped out by default. Maybe you could let people specify the depth of quoting they want, but default it to a reasonably small number.
* When a long paragraph is quoted, only the first sentence or so are extracted and retained in the quote.
* When a post containing quotes is quoted, nested quotes beyond a certain depth (two or three, perhaps) get stripped out by default. Maybe you could let people specify the depth of quoting they want, but default it to a reasonably small number.
Ah, now I know why I've just had to configure my rewriting proxy to rewrite the PH CSS so the quotes aren't impossibly small 
I do agree with the original premise, though I think the majority of the problem is due not to people not bothering to edit the quotes, but to people deliberately quoting multiple quotes for humorous effect (Note: the humour doesn't work
)
Don't agree with this, it's almost guaranteed to lose necessary context in an in-depth discussion where the long paragraph is quoted out of necessity.
Do agree with this, it would effectively counteract those with a deviant sense of humour while not interfering with sensible discussions.
I do agree with the original premise, though I think the majority of the problem is due not to people not bothering to edit the quotes, but to people deliberately quoting multiple quotes for humorous effect (Note: the humour doesn't work
) GreenV8S said:
* When a long paragraph is quoted, only the first sentence or so are extracted and retained in the quote.
Don't agree with this, it's almost guaranteed to lose necessary context in an in-depth discussion where the long paragraph is quoted out of necessity.
GreenV8S said:
* When a post containing quotes is quoted, nested quotes beyond a certain depth (two or three, perhaps) get stripped out by default. Maybe you could let people specify the depth of quoting they want, but default it to a reasonably small number.
Do agree with this, it would effectively counteract those with a deviant sense of humour while not interfering with sensible discussions.
You don't know me at all Ted, so feel free to ignore.
But I have been a web-monkey off and on for a few years.
IMO the automatic small is a huge improvement. Smaller borders would help too.
I also think you could forbid nested quotes without losing much of real value (i.e. mostly the non-comedy visual effects)...
But I have been a web-monkey off and on for a few years.
IMO the automatic small is a huge improvement. Smaller borders would help too.
I also think you could forbid nested quotes without losing much of real value (i.e. mostly the non-comedy visual effects)...
Pigeon said:
GreenV8S said:
* When a long paragraph is quoted, only the first sentence or so are extracted and retained in the quote.
Don't agree with this, it's almost guaranteed to lose necessary context in an in-depth discussion where the long paragraph is quoted out of necessity.Personally I reckon that losing this would be an advantage. If you've got a sensible discussion going, you don't need a quote a whole page of text in order to know what the post was about. After all, the post you're replying to is on the next page. (Or at least it would be if the next three pages weren't wasted with quoted quotes.) If you're replying to a sentence or two, then quote that. Otherwise, all you're doing is wasting screen real estate.
If you really want to allow people to spew quotes all over the place, you can always provide alternative quoting modes for example [quote=] extracting a synopsis, and [quoteFull=] giving you the whole damn*d lot.
Agree on the screen real-estate - it really helps if you can see the quote and the reply on the same page. And if someone was paying attention they've already read the quote anyway, so small is ok. Looks good too.
Less sure about limiting automatically to the first line(s) of the quoted paragraph though - it should work (in theory) if we all wrote correct English, but in practice I doubt any of us structure our paragraphs well enough.
Feel a bit cheeky commenting as I am a relative noob; let me know if out of order
Less sure about limiting automatically to the first line(s) of the quoted paragraph though - it should work (in theory) if we all wrote correct English, but in practice I doubt any of us structure our paragraphs well enough.
Feel a bit cheeky commenting as I am a relative noob; let me know if out of order
grumbledoak said:
Less sure about limiting automatically to the first line(s) of the quoted paragraph though - it should work (in theory) if we all wrote correct English, but in practice I doubt any of us structure our paragraphs well enough.
I don't know how easy it is to do well, but YahooGroups does this quite well and I seem to remember that Outlook does something similar.
GreenV8S said:
I don't know how easy it is to do well, but YahooGroups does this quite well and I seem to remember that Outlook does something similar.
Good point, I don't use YahooGroups but it works pretty well in Outlook's Auto-preview thingy, where it just shows a line and some dots...
edited to be a bit more precise
Edited by grumbledoak on Tuesday 6th June 21:12
GreenV8S said:
Well since I'm not the poor shmuck who has to make it work ...
why not have the best of both worlds, with a quote that starts off as a summary and expands to a full quote if you click on it. Sounds like the sort of thing a bit of client side JScript would take care of?
why not have the best of both worlds, with a quote that starts off as a summary and expands to a full quote if you click on it. Sounds like the sort of thing a bit of client side JScript would take care of?
Oi! Humphries no!
GreenV8S said:
Personally I reckon that losing this would be an advantage. If you've got a sensible discussion going, you don't need a quote a whole page of text in order to know what the post was about. After all, the post you're replying to is on the next page. (Or at least it would be if the next three pages weren't wasted with quoted quotes.) If you're replying to a sentence or two, then quote that. Otherwise, all you're doing is wasting screen real estate.
A whole page I agree is over the top, but a couple of sentences is under the bottom. IMO one should quote enough of the original post that the reply is in context and makes sense without having to flip back and forth between different pages to relate the reply to the original, because flipping pages is a pain. In a discussion involving complex points it might well be necessary to quote a paragraph or two.
GreenV8S said:
If you really want to allow people to spew quotes all over the place, you can always provide alternative quoting modes for example [quote=] extracting a synopsis, and [quoteFull=] giving you the whole damn*d lot.
Don't quite get you here. How does your synopsis extraction algorithm work? If it runs in the poster's brain, what's the advantage in having two different tags?
GreenV8S said:
Well since I'm not the poor shmuck who has to make it work ...
why not have the best of both worlds, with a quote that starts off as a summary and expands to a full quote if you click on it. Sounds like the sort of thing a bit of client side JScript would take care of?
why not have the best of both worlds, with a quote that starts off as a summary and expands to a full quote if you click on it. Sounds like the sort of thing a bit of client side JScript would take care of?
That would be good.
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