Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

Awesome. Thanks @Velocio, that gives me something to get started on.

The post I made about petulance was in reply to tester. He is right in that I would have been better to use the reply button. I tend not to if my post is directly below the one I am replying to.

I'll try to look at the JS asap.

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.

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.

@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

The plot thickens.

What browser are you using on the iPhone? I use chrome and you get no quote at all.

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?

Grief and remorse.

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.

Of course the real lesson is: I should write my own JavaScript.

It may be primitive, but at least I'd understand it.

Safari. Highlight text in a post and hit 'Reply' at the bottom of the post.

I post on a forum that has threaded posting. There's a 40 page thread on there at the moment but the latest post could be at the end or on a thread on page 10 or something. It's an absolute sod to use.

I agree, we should all go back to NNTP and Pine.

Editing posts - I've made a couple of amendments to a sale thread, however when I go to edit again, my editing box seems to show a previous version from this morning, even after Alt+F5'ing. Maybe it's a browser thing? (IE11)

Attachments show the edit box (and attachment previews) and the thread as it is currently, which do not match-up...

2 Attachments

When you edit... do you user the browser's back button to go back to edit it, or do you visit it again and then click edit?

I've just looked and it seems fine. And that is loaded server-side and is loading the correct version. From my viewpoint it's fine. But... if you user the browser's back button, that isn't "visit a newer version of this page you visited before" it's "visit the page before, as near as possible to how it was".

The attachments are loaded via AJAX, so even visiting an old version would get the latest attachments, but the comment content is loaded server-side and so using the back button can instruct some browsers to use any cached version they already have in memory. Especially as the page viewing the old comment to be edited is fetched by a GET request.

Rule of thumb: Never go back, go forward.

It's borked for everybody on all platforms :-)

Actually works on Windows 7, Firefox version 46.0.1!

I don't see mdcc's posts so don't know what he was talking about.

Any clues?

Just some hyperbole.

It's actually a bit hilarious. He's seemed very concerned about quoting for some reason, and then this gem:

The archive of rec.bicycles.tech suggests that fora are not ephemeral, they have a long tail where strangers from the future can see how generous Sheldon and Jobst were in giving their time to educate people.

It's not about the info, it's about the credit for "educating."

I think he fancies himself the new Sheldon.

(His post was actually a bit cuntish. Keep him on ignore).

He has got his quoting game down to an artform tbf.

I want to know who else is on @Velocio 's ignore list.
Having asked, it would be reassuring to get an answer...

No-one else.

This singular ignore improves the whole experience immeasurably.

(His post was actually a bit cuntish. Keep him on ignore).

If that's enough to qualify for ignoring, you should probably be blocking half the forum.

He's answered thousands of questions and helped out a lot of people on this forum, including myself. Tone down the distain a little bit, yeah?

I don't have anyone on ignore. Because of that I'm able to see, and in this case call, people's bullshit.

David, when I click the link in this post ...

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/13040993/

... i.e., using the microcosm.app link re-write http://microcosm.app/out/PT3gh (the link is http rather than https), it takes me to some rubbish page at ...

http://doubleclick.net/

... via "http.com". If I c&p the Ham & High link, I get to the desired page fine (Firefox 42.0 in Linux Mint--I imagine there may be a newer browser version available).

No idea if it's particularly significant, was just odd.

The link is http://microcosm.app/out/euKgh and it works well. But it seems an older version of the comment exists which had a broken link,

Subtle change: You can now filter messages to only show the unread ones.