Auto-strip quote when it's of entire previous message?

Auto-strip quote when it's of entire previous message?
by blargg on 2010-06-09 (#62731)

How hard would it be to have the posting software strip out a quoting of the entire immediately previous message? There's little reason to to so, and it just clutters up the thread. Several users on this and other boards regularly quote the immediately previous message, and it's quite annoying.

I'm thinking that the script that initially fills the message with the quote of the previous message could save this text, then later see if the message being posted begins with the same text, and remove it if so. But maybe it doesn't maintain any state on the server side, making this a non-starter.

Re: Auto-strip quote when it's of entire previous message?
by tokumaru on 2010-06-09 (#62732)

blargg wrote:

I'm thinking that the script that initially fills the message with the quote of the previous message could save this text, then later see if the message being posted begins with the same text, and remove it if so.

Sometimes I quote part of the previous message in order to indicate what specific part of it I'm replying to or is relevant to my post (like I did now). By your logic I wouldn't be able to indicate that I'm answering something asked in the beginning of the previous post.

by blargg on 2010-06-09 (#62734)

blargg wrote:
How hard would it be to have the posting software strip out a quoting of the entire immediately previous message?

by tepples on 2010-06-09 (#62736)

Even if it doesn't save state, it can still check at preview and submit time.

But how would you propose to handle an exact quotation of an entire post that is not the last one in the topic? If you cut it out, readers won't know to which post I'm replying.

by tokumaru on 2010-06-09 (#62737)

blargg wrote:
blargg wrote:
How hard would it be to have the posting software strip out a quoting of the entire immediately previous message?

blargg wrote:
I'm thinking that the script that initially fills the message with the quote of the previous message could save this text, then later see if the message being posted begins with the same text, and remove it if so.

by blargg on 2010-06-09 (#62742)

tokumaru, let's say I hit quote on the last message in a thread and it fills the text box with "[quote[blabla[/quote]". Then I add some text after that and hit Submit. The software would see that I simply added text to the end, and strip off the quote, so it would be as if I had simply typed the message into a blank box.

tepples wrote:
But how would you propose to handle an exact quotation of an entire post that is not the last one in the topic? If you cut it out, readers won't know to which post I'm replying.

It should only strip out in the case I outlined, where the immediately previous message is quoted in its entirety. All other cases are legitimate; you may want to quote a portion of the immediately previous message, to set context for yours, or you may want to quote an entire message before the immediately previous one, again, to set context. Context is the central point. If you reply without any quote, you're in the context set by the immediately previous message, thus you don't need to quote it in its entirety.

by tokumaru on 2010-06-09 (#62747)

So the new message has to start with the entire previous message, OK. I don't oppose to this fix, but I don't think it's something critical either.

In other words, unless the quoted message is a huge wall of text and images, followed only by a tiny sentence, I'm not annoyed (what I described though is annoying even if the quoted message isn't the one immediately before).

by blargg on 2010-06-09 (#62755)

Just now a good example of what I was referring to was posted: http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopi ... 2753#62753

The main idea here is that there's no reason a person whould have to be careful to avoid this, when it can be automated. In fact, if one were really anal, one could apply this retroactively, cleaning up a board. I've read boards where people do this all the time, and it's really tiring when you've experienced times when it doesn't occur much. There's a kind of mental "ugh noise, skim thread less carefully" mode that develops in response to it, which lowers the quality of discussion IMO.

by tokumaru on 2010-06-09 (#62758)

blargg wrote:
Just now a good example of what I was referring to was posted: http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopi ... 2753#62753

Heh, I just read that before reading this, and that reminded me of this thread too.

Quote:
There's a kind of mental "ugh noise, skim thread less carefully" mode that develops in response to it, which lowers the quality of discussion IMO.

I get what you mean. In here it doesn't bother me so much, because this a somewhat slow/small forum and threads never grow 10 pages overnight (which reduces the need to "skim less carefully"), but I have been bothered by this elsewhere.

I don't know if someone is up to the task of coding this though... The principle sure is simple, but I don't know if messing with the board's system this much is.

by blargg on 2010-06-09 (#62764)

I just realized that another much simpler approach would be to simply not show the Quote button for the last post in a thread, or have it act the same as the Reply button at the bottom of a thread. If someone really wants to quote from the last message, he can copy and paste.

And yeah, I wasn't demanding this be implemented, just throwing out some ideas for what seemed like relatively simple implementations.

by MetalSlime on 2010-06-10 (#62770)

Removing the quote button is not as good IMO. Consider the case where you hit reply, and someone else posts in the same thread before you finish.

by tokumaru on 2010-06-10 (#62778)

And it would also be annoying having to manually copy the section of the post that is relevant to the reply (along with the name of the poster, for a proper quote box). Deleting the parts that are not relevant is much better.

So although I don't oppose to automatically stripping entire quotes at the time of posting, I do object to simply removing/remapping the quote button.

by koitsu on 2010-06-10 (#62811)

blargg, I read this thread and I think I understand what you're getting at. You're basically wanting quoting of the entire previous message (keyword here is **entire**) silently stripped from the post, unless the user edits the quoted portion (slims it down, etc.).

Do I understand correctly? If so, yeah, I think that's possible, however I'm not sure it really solves the problem. Users always find a way to achieve what they want; if quoting the entire thing is auto-stripped, they'll learn that, and then start doing something like adding a newline after the closing ] for the quote, or doing who knows what else. I see this happen pretty regularly on other forums (users basically "abusing" the system so they can get what they want).

Implementing what you want straightforward is possible (I could probably do this), but... well, if you have ideas on how to deal with the above, I'm all ears.

by Banshaku on 2010-06-10 (#62814)

You don't need any coding: just warn the user in a civilized way to not do so. If the user still continue and ignore: freeze is account for a few weeks.

Just don't waste time with editing the php code, that's not worth it.

by blargg on 2010-06-11 (#62821)

koitsu wrote:
You're basically wanting quoting of the entire previous message (keyword here is **entire**) silently stripped from the post, unless the user edits the quoted portion (slims it down, etc.).

Yeah, but only if it's a fairly trivial thing to do.

The point of the simplistic algorithm isn't to prevent a user from quoting the entire immediately previous message; it's just to prevent him from doing so unless he specifically wants to. If such a filter were implemented and some user intentionally kept bypassing it by adding a newline or extra text inside the quote, then he either has a good reason to, or is just trying to make trouble; if the latter, warn/ban is clearly in order. So it's to prevent accidental/lazy unnecessary quoting, not intentional abuse.

As Banshaku says, you could do so entirely via admins, but many people do this unncessary quoting often, I'm guessing due to lazyness or haste. Again, if it can be easily automated, then that makes more sense, and can eliminate more of the unnecessary quoting without having to manually contact users.

Again, I posted this because a) I had thought of a possibly simple way to implement it, and b) I believe it contributes to a noticeable reduction in signal-to-noise ratio, by adding visual clutter. I believe that when encountering it often, you become less careful in reading posts, since your "something repeated, start skimming to find new text" trigger threshold gets necessarily lowered. I don't want any special treatment, just to

by Dwedit on 2010-06-11 (#62828)

So, you want something like a javascript enhanced Quote button that automatically uses the selected text when you click on the button?

by blargg on 2010-06-11 (#62829)

Uhhh, no. I could repeat what I've said a few times, but it's simpler to just refer you to the messages on the previous page.

by tepples on 2010-06-11 (#62831)

Let me explain in a manner that someone implementing this feature could understand:

Before adding a post N to a topic, read the recent post R from the topic. If N begins with a [quote] element, let Q be the inner markup of this element. If Q = R, remove this [quote] element from N before writing it to the database. For more robustness, case-fold and remove whitespace from Q and R before comparing them.