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The problem with quoting a whole message every time is that it may be lengthy and then results in amplification.
1 line gets quoted, the next person replies to the prior and that quotes the whole message included the quoted bit, and so it goes until you have a Christmas Tree of HTML blockquotes.
This is then the worst possible outcome for the very devices you mentioned: mobile phones or tablets. The page becomes a scrollfest, and the blockquotes squash the text into ever diminishing horizontal width... itself causing the page to lengthen even more and amplifying the effect of that scrollfest.
I know that because we tested it. Then we laughed, hard... and agreed not to do that because it was plainly silly. Very funny, but ultimately silly.
The chaining of replies works best, but ideally we'd have finished the implementation more fully... as in, if you clicked "in reply to" we wouldn't jump you away but would have fetched that single comment via AJAX and shown it in context. We didn't finish that unfortunately, but that would resolve the "what was this in reply to" thing.
It doesn't solve fisking though. But then again, those who fisk are indistinguishable from trolls most of the time, so I'm cool with not encouraging that.
Velocio-
@mashton - I've just tried the highlight and reply functionality on my iphone and it puts the chevron in the right place. It's not broken everywhere.
@Velocio - selecting on iOS is cumbersome - could you have a quote button next to 'reply' that automatically quoted the first 40 or so characters of the post? That, in many cases, would be sufficient. And always more satisfactory than
lines starting with a 'greater than' denote quoted text
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This is then the worst possible outcome for the very devices you mentioned: mobile phones or tablets. The page becomes a scrollfest, and the blockquotes squash the text into ever diminishing horizontal width... itself causing the page to lengthen even more and amplifying the effect of that scrollfest.
People wouldn't care so much about the quotes in anything that offered threaded conversations, so that it was easy to see who was being responded to and to see the original message. Web forums suck.
I can remember when many ISPs used NNTP for their user discussion forums (kept separate from USENET because trolls). Your average Windows user could read them using Outlook Express, UNIX geeks like me could use our newsreader of choice and it all worked well. Or you could use the crappy web interface that they offered as an alternative, where there was no threading, searching was shit etc. Gradually, they ditched supporting the NNTP solution and went entirely to the crappy web interface, which became the crappy standard.
Not that this helps anybody. Just my 5 minutes of remembering another example of the market making the shittiest of technological decisions What's the opposite of nostalgia?
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Your unfinished solution seems the most elegant but I have used forums where quoting shows the post you're replying to but quotes don't cascade ie. a quote inside that post won't display.
It's not as neat as your solution but maybe easier to implement and will show at least what someone is replying to.
bq
itsbruce
Dramatic_Hammer
If you could actually just make it quote the whole post by default that would be good. That half-baked implementation has never worked on phones or tablets.