The reply system on here seems incredibly weird. Like, it’s easy to reply to someone but it’s difficult for a reader of a thread to understand what’s going on.
Defaulting the replies to be more like the old forums seems like it’d clear up a lot of confusions. Since rn, if a thread is particularly long and there are more than 2 or 3 discussions going on, I have to do a lot of scrolling to actually get some context on some of the posts. It’s a bit convoluted and seems detrimental to clear discussions.
Another weird thing I noticed is that sometimes it doesn’t exactly show on the top-right of posts whether the post is a reply or not. Seems like a bug or smth?
To quote the message you’re replying to, just select the text prior to hitting the reply button.
Those messages without “Reply” at the top right aren’t replies to a specific message within the topic (I.e., they were created by pressing the Reply button at the bottom of the topic instead of on a particular message) but are replies to the OP.
That seems like an extremely convoluted way to reply to someone though. Wouldn’t it just be better to make the quoting thing a default? It gives context to the reply and it makes discussions a lot clearer. I don’t see much benefits to just not having the quotes as a default.
The autoquote feature of Xenoforo was kinda horrible though - because it mean’t that the forums were filled with wasted repeative space you had to scroll past to read a whole thread.
You beat me to it. Auto quoting leads to long, repetitive posts as more levels of replies get quoted. It’s a conscious design decision by the authors of Discourse to prod people to be thoughtful about what they include in a reply.
But what about context? Without auto-quotes or at least an indication of who the person was replying to (Actually might be a bug; I see plenty of my replies not getting marked as being a reply and such), a reader would have to scroll through many posts to find whatever post was being replied to, wouldn’t they?
You can tap the reply indicator to jump to the post it is replying to. Then tap the back button in bottom right to jump back to your post or something like that
That only gives context as to whom the person is replying to, tho. Not as much as to what is being replied to and that seems a lot more important to me.
I can see that it’s a useful feature, but it wouldn’t be much help when there’s a long chain of replies and stuff, I assume which seems like a problem to me.
Also, what’s that whole thing you mentioned about repetitve posts?
Which by design are left out because its a huge waste of viewing space and… we have come full circle.
Broadly speaking its part of the design philosophy of discourse to not have them - they declared war on wasted forum space - there are several other contextual indications that yes are less intrusive but also have the advantage of being less instrusive…
We can’t enable a feature the forum software doesn’t have and while since its open source we could build this feature that sounds like a lot of work for a problem thats already solved.
Oh. I think I realised what had me confused in the first place. I didn’t realize that the reply bubble thingy just showed the post that was being replied to. I had assumed that it had to scroll you back to the post like in our old forums.
Ye. This makes sense. Can see how this works now. So, I guess maybe including these things in the tutorial could be useful?
