"Automatically removed quote of whole previous post." - how do I turn that off?

No idea, but I’ve reverted that post to the previous version with the quote…

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Some discussion of the feature here and apparently there is a remove full quote setting to disable it.

Discourse automatically hides full quotes (not partial ones) when the quote corresponds to the previous message, since it assumes it’s clear you are answering to the previous message.

Can someone who looks after this system please fix this bug? It is still happening: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/how-to-tag-markers-of-forest-compartments/2322/7?u=someoneelse

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@SomeoneElse as noted before this is not a bug, it’s the expected behavior. It’s enabled by default to avoid the visual noise of quoting the full previous message.

If you reply to another message that is not the previous message or you just quote part of the message, you will always get the quote visible.

(If you want this to be a preference changed per user, you will have to open a feature request with discourse, since this is not an option right now)

Until you change the flag, it is both.

At https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/how-to-tag-markers-of-forest-compartments/2322/3 several people have contributed to the thread. Which post has been replied to is invisible. My original reply https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/how-to-tag-markers-of-forest-compartments/2322/6?u=someoneelse had no indication of this whatsoever.

If someone has explicitly selected some text to quote it it makes sense to let them, surely?

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Each post reply has an indicator to know the message you are replying to, unless you click reply at the bottom of the page or to the first message. Quoted replies have an arrow up to go to the message you are replying to.

I understand that being able to full quote the previous message in a topic is important for you, but changing this for everyone by default is something that I wouldn’t suggest do unless we have that request coming from more users here.

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If someone has explicitly selected some text to quote it it makes sense
to let them, surely?

I just got stung with this too here ( Turn off character emoji :short_code: conversion of characters? - #5 by amapanda_ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ ). My reply makes less sense (I quoted part of @nukeador’s previous post), because Discourse has merged it all together.

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This might be a different issue because you were replying by email, which probably handles quoted text differently to avoid the whole email including the previous message in each message sent by email.

I don’t see any reason why you should not be able to quote the whole message.
I suggest we make a poll or alike to settle this as a democratic decision instead of admin preferences?

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I don’t see any reason why you should and nobody has yet explained a possible reason how it could be beneficial.

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_ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ_️ above said “My reply makes less sense … because Discourse has merged it all together”.

You may disagree with that, and you might think that where people have explicitly quoted text to reply to it should be changed in some way, but it’s simply not true to say “nobody has yet explained”.

My view is that (like on almost every other conversation platform ever written) what people actually intended to post should be what is posted in their name.

This thread is about having a full quote of the message right before. I really can’t think of a case where this makes sense. _ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ_️ had a different issue with a partial quote (and these should not be affected like here where I partially quote you) which really seems to be strange.

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The one and only reason perhaps: in the old forum it was possible, so it should require a reason to abolish it in the new forum, which I haven’t seen.

[edit: typo]

To be honest, it doesn’t matter if you can’t think of a case - that’s not what this thread is about. The thread title is asking “how do I turn that off”. It’s asking for the ability to change a setting per-user, not the change of a global default.

To explain in more detail why I might might do this, typically it’d be for emphasis to say “this is the thing that I am replying to”. Often there are many posts by many different people in a thread, and it helps to make it clear that I’m replying to this particular post.

Oddly the original post now shows what I originally wrote because someone (not me!) has reverted the system edit.

I don’t know what is the normal way of engaging with other users across every other OSM communications platform out there - I suspect that no one person does. I’m sure that there are some where lots of quoting of previous messages is normal, and some where it isn’t. In order to accommodate that, I’m suggesting that this platform should:

  • by default, not change what the user actually wrote
  • if it must, make it easy for a user to change it back to what they actually meant
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This can’t be currently changed per user, see my previous message on what’s the best approach to have this available:

Perhaps that “system knows better than the user” autocorrect feature should at least not auto-activate unless quoted amount is big(-ish)? I’ve also been bitten by this on quoting one-line several-words sentence (Which happens to be whole previous post). I’ve also worked around it by removing last word from quote, but that is not ideal.

The issue is, without quoting it is often hard to get a sense of discussion in Discourse, because:

  • due to the way threads are visually rendered in Discourse, (i.e. without any threading immediately visible without user clicking buttons and manually tracing the thread; as opposed to say how mailman web archive does it) user is not aware what post is reply to what other post.
  • due to confusing UI, many users are unlikely to reply to correct posts (i.e. they’d likely click that global-thread-reply button on the bottom, rather then correct specific-message-reply-button), i.e. just the fact that user clicked on specific reply button is no indication that their message was really intended to be in that place in reply thread.
  • that leads to users not being able to trust Discourse threading (even in rare cases that they can be bothered to learn and use that slow, manual and arcane UI. And to think people were complaining that mailman mailing lists were hard to learn. Go figure :smile: - But I digress.)
  • so, most times the users can’t be expected to trace discourse threading. Which is kinda bummer, but not a huge issue in itself, since Discourse shows whole thread as flat anyway, so many users probably do not even know that it supports threading, so they use it as they would any other threadless forum - by quoting thing they reply to so others can know what they are talking about
  • quoting is needed especially since sometimes reply needs message as it could be a reply to several previous messages, which changes what it means.
  • that quoting approach however breaks when system decides that you don’t really need that quoting and removes it by trying to be helpful.

So, yeah, it would be nice if that feature was improved (either per-user disable setting, or as question with user-override “are you sure you want to quote whole message?” or at least smarter auto-activate trigger as noted above). While it certainly is not happening all the time, it is annoying when it does happen.

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I find the way quoting is handled by discourse extremely unhelpful when using the mailing list mode, basically you have to open discourse to understand what a reply refers to

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Yes, it’s one of its problems. I’ve linked more in:

There is a curious unlabelled symbol at the top left of the icons above the comment box that claims to “quote whole post”. I wonder if that will work?

Edit: It does! It;s not really a solution, because it’s a per-reply action rather than a user setting, but it is a workaround.

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