[RFC] Remove innermost quote

[galaxyAbstractor]

Scenario
A debate or long discussion is going on in a thread with multiple persons taking part, each quoting each others. At some point (rather fast in a debate) you will hit the "max nested quote" limit (default 3?) and you will not be able to post unless you remove a quote or two.

The problem
To be able to post, you have to remove either only the innermost quote, or all nested quotes leaving only the outermost quote intact (or just remove all quotes all together). The problem appears if there is a lot of BBCode or text in the quotes then it's extremely hard to remove the quotes by hand without messing up the syntax. This happens daily in a forum I am actively partaking in and the posts get messy. Even worse is if you have a custom BBCode installed like a spoiler tag and it's placed inside of one of the quotes and the structure is messed up, it can lead to the entire page below the post gets malformed or not showing at all.

Solution
Automatically remove the innermost quote if the quote limit is reached, alternatively only leaving the outermost quote (the post being quoted). It don't believe this would be against any usability issues as one of the quotes have to go either way, it just does it automatically, leaving less risk of user messing up.

Take this example structure as comparison:

Code: Select all

    [quote]
        Outermost quote
        [quote]
            2
            [quote]
                3
                [quote]
                    4 // Hit max nested quote limit
                [/quote]
            [/quote]
            Hey check this out

            [quote]
                Blah blah rest of some other post
            [/quote]
        [/quote]
        
       Or check this
       [quote]
            2
            [quote]
                3           
                [quote]
                    4 // Hit max nested quote limit
                [/quote]
            [/quote]
       [/quote]
    [/quote]

(indented because I confused myself, usually it isn't indented like this, also somewhat extreme example of showing how hard it can be to remove quotes the right way)

[callumacrae]

Isn't this what "Maximum nesting depth for quotes" in Post settings does?

EDIT: Ah, sort of. It errors:


I think that it would be better if it automatically removed the quote. At that depth, it wouldn't be read anyway and enough context is provided.

[jsebean]

I think that it would be better if it automatically removed the quote.

Isn't that what this RFC is about?

+1. Makes life easier for people who are new to BBCode, people who have to edit messages because quotes are messed up, and so it just makes life much easier for everyone, especially those new to BBCode.

[Oleg]

Is the bbcode engine rewrite meant to take care of this?

[naderman]

It would certainly make this very easy.

[galaxyAbstractor]

I've been thinking about this one for a bit and I think I might have a way to solve it when I looked at the code. Just a question, should the user be alerted that a quote that was too deep was removed, or just remove it automatically without mentioning it to the user?

In my opinion, I would just have removed the quote automatically as the user most likely would have to remove it either way. Does that sound ok?

[Pony99CA]

Isn't this what "Maximum nesting depth for quotes" in Post settings does?

That's what I would have guessed, too. If it just gives an error, we should remove it.

I've been thinking about this one for a bit and I think I might have a way to solve it when I looked at the code. Just a question, should the user be alerted that a quote that was too deep was removed, or just remove it automatically without mentioning it to the user?

In my opinion, I would just have removed the quote automatically as the user most likely would have to remove it either way. Does that sound ok?

If the user Previews the post, display a message above the preview saying that the quote was removed; if he just Submits the post, remove it automatically.

Steve

[keith10456]

+1

[bantu]

This only works for full quotes using the quote button, otherwise we do want to tamper with user data because the quotes may contain external content which we should certainly not just throw away.

[Pony99CA]

This only works for full quotes using the quote button, otherwise we do want to tamper with user data because the quotes may contain external content which we should certainly not just throw away.

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, but I think that you're saying that some people put copied material in QUOTE tags that aren't from posts.

While that's certainly true, if that material has been requoted, the original will still be there in the forum. I think that the only times that you'll run into problems are if somebody edited a nested quote or inserted new material there (which is against the spirit of quoting) or if somebody is quoting a deeply quoted post copied from another board (but you should link to the post anyway, at least in addition to quoting it).

The other alternative would be to have an "Unnest Quotes" button that would remove the inner quotes (and possibly automatically preview the post). If you had that, you could keep the error as it is today.

Steve