Forum eats blockquotes

General
1

It happened several times before (unfortunately not consistently), last time when I posted this reply a moment ago.

For a second or so, I see my post as intended (a quoted passage from a different post and below my reply). And then the quoted part disappears in front of my eyes. What the hell?! :face_with_monocle: Does anyone else experience the same problem?

2

I had a few occurrences of the likes lately, yes.
Perhaps only since I am using the forum as an app (some chrome extension) tho.

Forum eating blockquotes / caught in the act

image

2 Likes
3

I have noticed the forum software behaving in unexpected ways.

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4

Perhaps your forum account is eating other forum accounts, and thus the ones you were quoting become you. In which case, for obvious reasons, the quote bars have to come off.

:laughing:

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5

Letā€™s give that a try.

Edit: Yup, quote is gone. Kind of ironic. And you should be me now. Which is the bigger problem. :smile:

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6

Thank goodness we have software to resolve these existential crises!

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7

You meanā€¦ thereā€™s another software, that puts the quote back in? Kinda sophisticated. :smile:

But seriously. Why does this happen and how do we stop it? Itā€™s rather irritating. If I wouldnā€™t want to quote something Iā€™d just donā€™t do it to begin with.

9

It tries to keep the thread clean and easy to read in these two ways:

  • If you are responding to the poster right above, the conversation flows seamlessly. We donā€™t need to see someone else saying what was said, all over again, an inch away from where it was said, to understand your response.
  • If the response is non-linear, like this one (on purpose, as normally I would just respond to your most recent question), then in the top right it shows who you are responding to. If youā€™ve lost the thread of the conversation, that can be clicked, which opens the post being responded to for reference right above (where an unnecessary full-post quote would go). From that you can click the up-arrow to jump to the original if you want.

So there are two ways to see the note someone is responding to, either by looking up a bit, or clicking a button.

10

But if I only wanted to focus on that part ?

(So far so good. Quote did not disappear.)

11

Exactly, thatā€™s a useful kind of quoting (as a kind of abstract example of course). You want to ignore the majority of the post and respond to one piece of it, or maybe some bits from several different posts. Itā€™s copying the whole entire post you are responding to that is unnecessary.

And do note, the reader is left with choices. See those two arrows on the right side of the quote? One expands the quotation to the full post, other jumps you to it.

12

Funny that Vincentā€™s reply demonstrates the typical situation where throwing away the (long) quoted text would actually make sense ā€“ and the forum doesnā€™t remove it.

13

It never even crossed my mind to quote in full the message just above, but yet, I had quotes disappearing too, lately.

1 Like
14

If the system removes a quote it is logged, so just let me know where to look (or maybe you can as well, by clicking on the orange pencil that shows edit history, not sure if thatā€™s public info).

15

Assuming there is one. Which there only is if the user edited the post past the delayā€¦
Weā€™ll see what we can get from it next time it happens. But something tells me there wonā€™t be any traces of it. Unless the forum considers itself as a user.
And perhaps thatā€™s the problem: the forum, whiles becoming self aware, realized how much in the end he loathes us. That might just be step one of an evil planā€¦

16

Wouldnā€™t the easiest answer in this case be: ā€œthereā€? :see_no_evil:

But thanks for the clarification. Iā€™m not a huge fan of how this works (auto-changing a post after the fact), but at least itā€™s not a bug.

17

Except the quotes are /not/ gone from my post (as playfully, but presumably sincerely alleged) ā€“ not in my browsers anyway; not in Safari (3.1.2, admittedly old), not in Firefox (104.0.2), not in Chrome (105.0.5195.102). Which suggests the annoying behavior is browser (version) specific.

18

I see no quotes whatsoever neither in your post or in the one you just replied to.
Chrome. 105.0.5195.102

What I get

image
image778Ɨ397 25.8 KB

image
image826Ɨ320 19.9 KB

1 Like
19

My latest did not include any quote, so that is okay. But the second image you posted indicates that quotes are not just becoming non-quoted material ā€” which is what I was understanding you to be saying heretofore ā€” but vanishing entirely, reducing my smarty-pants post to just its trailing emoji. So, weirder than I was getting.

Something is eating the internet!

Since browser version evidently matters here, it might be helpful to know the browsers (and version) where people are seeing this.

20

I have 2 screenshots in thereā€¦

There: fixed it.

21

This puzzles me exceedingly. You originally had screenshots of my two posts, but in your screenshot update you removed the shot of my original post which is the only one which actually seemed to show a problem. Now, weā€™ve just got to versions of an image of my second post which had no quote back material in the first place.

Am I missing something here?