[RFC] Remove innermost quote

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Mess
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by Mess »

theallzaz wrote:Changing the style would be nice too. But i think we are changing this topic scope. This topic issue isn't related with the style, but the problem is: as admin, you can already set a limit to the depth for quotes. Right? But if you does that, when the user tries to Submit a message with quotes in excess, he is forced to manually remove it. If i am quoting a post with a lot of words, it becomes a boring task.

I think if i'm limiting the depth for quotes, obviously I want them to be automatically removed. The poster don't care with the forum quote limit, so is not nice to ask him to manually remove it. Well, just my opinion
+1

MaFeSa
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by MaFeSa »

I think if i'm limiting the depth for quotes, obviously I want them to be automatically removed. The poster don't care with the forum quote limit, so is not nice to ask him to manually remove it. Well, just my opinion
+1

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EXreaction
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by EXreaction »

Changing the style is not out of the scope of the topic. The reason that quote depth limit was added in the first place is because the view topic page could become a huge ugly mess if too many quotes were nested. If the actual problem is fixed, that limit can be removed entirely.

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imkingdavid
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by imkingdavid »

I don't think the limit should be removed. I think both issues should be solved; we should fix the issue with the style taking up so much space, and we should make the software automatically remove quotes beyond the maximum nesting depth.
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brunoais
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by brunoais »

imkingdavid wrote:I don't think the limit should be removed. I think both issues should be solved; we should fix the issue with the style taking up so much space, and we should make the software automatically remove quotes beyond the maximum nesting depth.
This ^.
IMO the only thing left is to decide how should that be done.
Some say that the user should not be warned, others say that the user should be warned (like me)...
Where does that place us in? Behind an option?

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KurtisC
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by KurtisC »

I stumbled upon this thread through a search because I wanted to automatically truncate quotes more than my set limit on the forum (which is set to one on mine).

As a site administrator, I'm not bothered about changing the styling or the way it looks particularly on the forum because at the end of the day, quotes are simply repeating what's been written already in a thread. I'm just interested in keeping the site looking clean, keep user friendliness to a maximum and ensure the site as a whole runs smoothly. Because of the limit with quotations, people had to manually remove them which caused problems on my board where people didn't know how to and the moderation team had to manually fill in quotes because the user took them out (so there was an ending quote tag but no beginning in most cases). If someone hits 'quote' on a post with more than one level, I would much prefer it if quotes were just automatically removed. No fuss.

I came across this mod which works perfectly fine at this present moment in time. It would be nice to have this automatically implemented in PHPBB, but that's the solution I was looking for (and I presume the reason this thread on here was created in the first place). Quite simply, this is what I'm looking for as far as this particular topic goes.
EXreaction wrote:I think to solve this, first we need to make sure we understand what the real problem is that we are trying to solve, them design a way to solve it appropriately.

Currently, the problem with unlimited quote depth is that if the quotes are nested too deeply (depending upon the browser window), messages will be stretched really long or be cut off and it becomes really difficult or impossible to read. This happens because we pad each quote by some number of pixels and display each quote the same (difficult to follow the message through quotes if it gets too deep).

One of the key items here is that output is dependent on browser width, so a mobile device might only work with 3 nested quotes while a large display might work with 20 nested quotes.

If this is the core problem with quotes we're trying to fix, using a fixed limit to the depth of nested quotes doesn't really make much sense. Rather, the display of quotes should be changed so that messages are not becoming stretched or cut off and following nested quotes isn't as difficult.
Personally, I find having too many quotes counter-intuitive and a stumbling block to discussions. I've been on many forums where someone has quote embedded five / ten / fifteen levels and responded with a one liner. It's a waste of screen-space and looks outright messy on people's screens. As a preference and a rule I enforce on my own websites, I prefer people to quote one level, two, three at the absolute top-end before thinking 'okay, this is too much now. Why've you included all this pointless guff?' I think someone already mentioned this, but most people don't bother filtering out the pointless information but hit 'quote' because they're directly responding to that post. All that's needed is to simply truncate the quote level that is set higher than what the administrator of the forum says; one in my case, and three by default.
theallzaz wrote:Changing the style would be nice too. But i think we are changing this topic scope. This topic issue isn't related with the style, but the problem is: as admin, you can already set a limit to the depth for quotes. Right? But if you does that, when the user tries to Submit a message with quotes in excess, he is forced to manually remove it. If i am quoting a post with a lot of words, it becomes a boring task.

I think if i'm limiting the depth for quotes, obviously I want them to be automatically removed. The poster don't care with the forum quote limit, so is not nice to ask him to manually remove it. Well, just my opinion
Agreed.

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JoshyPHP
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by JoshyPHP »

Nicofuma wrote:Someone should bump this topic sometime in 2015
Funny that you said that (no need to verify, that quote is 100% legit) because that's exactly what I was thinking! :roll:

I can implement the quote removal if you want it in 3.2. I need a Y/N decision on the following:
  1. Remove extra quotes from the text when the user click the "Quote" button
  2. Either:
    1. Display an error when the user tries to submit too many nested quotes (current behaviour)
    2. Automatically remove extra quotes from the submitted text, implemented in:
      1. posting.php
      2. message_parser
      3. the text_formatter.parser service
My preference goes to 1 + 2b-ii, although it would make sense to go with 2b-iii. The latter adds a @config dependency to the text_formatter.parser service, which doesn't feel right. The message_parser object should probably configure the parser service. Also, before anyone suggests going with 2a and 2b as an option, I'd rather not add another configuration setting.
Last edited by JoshyPHP on Sun May 17, 2015 11:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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DavidIQ
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by DavidIQ »

I'd agree with 1 and 2b-i I think. Otherwise we'd be storing extra text that won't get displayed, I think? (2b-ii)
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JoshyPHP
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by JoshyPHP »

No, it would store the same thing in the DB. posting.php uses an instance of message_parser which in turns calls the text_formatter.parser service. posting.php is used when submitting posts but I don't know whether it's used by anything else. The message_parser is used by everything that uses rich text, AFAIK.

Just writing about it makes me realize that it should clearly be 2b-ii because that's how every other settings work: max_font_size, max_img_height, max_img_width, max_smilies and max_urls. They are all set by message_parser. I'm going to edit the post accordingly.

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DavidIQ
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Re: [RFC] Remove innermost quote

Post by DavidIQ »

Sounds good to me then. I'm just realizing that 1 will remove the extra quotes anyways. So +1 on what you said.
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