new quote system

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fyrephlie
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new quote system

Post by fyrephlie »

you were busy this morning, eh?
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Top Gun
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Post by Top Gun »

Unless I missed something in the options, I'm heavily requesting the ability for all quotes to be expanded by default. It gets very annoying having to keep clicking on them just to see how people's posts reference each other.
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Post by fyrephlie »

seems like there should be an 'expand all' option... that way if you go to a page where you know you've seen all of them, you can leave em alone....

/2 cents
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Post by KoolBear »

TG,

It was supposed to clean up threads, tell me how many times do you view a thread for the "first" time?

Now how many times might you retutn to a thread to "follow" the conversation.

I admit now it would be nice if the LAST post was expanded by default, is this what you are saying?

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Post by Flabby Chick »

I'd go with all quotes being expanded. I don't like that feature, big pain.
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Post by fyrephlie »

looks great for me in firefox on my main *nix box.

i was doing some work in xp and opened the dbb in i.e. (eventually... been particularly slow today ;)) on another box... and OMG the scrollbars are horrid!!!

also, since the post does not defaul to the last post, when you click into a thread and mouse scroll down with the cursor mid screen... it pauses at each box to scroll it before continuing down. this is PARTICULARLY annoying when viewing topics in the E & C, which can have some pretty hefty quotes.

i hate to say it, but i am not big on this feature.
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Tetrad
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Post by Tetrad »

No sir I don't like it.
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Post by KoolBear »

Honestly Terad I wouldn't expect you to like anything I do ;)
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Post by Stryker »

What if you put an option in a person's profile for "Expand quote trees by default"? That way those who like it can use the option, while those who don't can simply use normal quotes.
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Post by Lothar »

I don't much like it either. It adds clicks if you want to see what's being quoted, and it only saves a small amount of screen space if any... unless, of course, people are quoting whole posts, in which case, they need to be reminded to trim what they're quoting.

Really, people should only quote what they're responding directly to. If they do that, there's no need to compress the quotes at all -- because everything in the quote box will be relevant.

The only time this really saves screen space is in a thread with a lot of longer quotes, in which case, it's a pain whenever you want to read the longer quotes anyway. If this stays, I'm going to start using code boxes for my quotes instead.

And, as fyrephlie mentioned, if you're using the mousewheel to scroll, the new quotes make it take longer to scroll.
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Post by fliptw »

Good idea, bad implementation.

its would work better if its was a div with no scrolling by default, rather than set to overflow(set overflow to hidden rather than auto)
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Post by Top Wop »

I thought it was useful to de-clutter long threads, but it gets annoying when it compresses quotes that are only 3 lines long. It should instead compress really long quotes that spans many lines.

I thought it was novel at first, but mayby we should take it out.
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Post by Pugwash »

please tell me how I turn this OFF. Its fugly!
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Post by KoolBear »

as time permits I will remove this MOD
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Post by DCrazy »

You're going to take it out? :(

Instead of taking it out, would it be possible to modify it (or maybe the [ dyk ] tag) into an [edit] tag instead? So that when I do [edit]Changed some stuff[/edit] it shows up as:

[Edit by DCrazy: Changed some stuff 2005-12-20 21:39 UTC]

I think that would be REALLY nifty, especially if [edit=Username] was available as well (would make moderation cool).

I've been on Wikipedia all day, forgive me for trying to bring its featureset here :P
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Post by KoolBear »

I will be happy to play around with it.

Honestly though this is a tough crowd.

I've come to realize that you can please some of the people some of the time .....
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Post by DCrazy »

Yeah, but the reactions tend to escalate when you change things that lots of people use. For example, the [ dyk ] tag didn't exist before, so nobody complained about changing it. Quotes, on the other hand, are incredibly well-used, and though I think the change was a great feature, especially for E&C, I understand that it can be a bit annoying when it shrinks a three-line quote, so I would have voted for making the threshold somewhere around 3 - 4 lines.

Nobody uses the [edit][/edit] style that I know of, except me, so adding it couldn't hurt that much.
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Post by Tetrad »

If it was cleaner (i.e. no near-useless "select" button and colored white), and only trimmed things that were longer than like 10 lines long, and the mouse scrolling issue was fixed I wouldn't mind it too much.

Although I would change the link to the enlarge to be sort of like how slashdot does it, with a text link at the bottom of the post that says something like "Click here to expand the rest of this quote" so it would otherwise look exactly the same as it used to.
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Post by Kilarin »

I'm with DCrazy and Tetrad. I think scrolling quotes is a great feature, but the size needs to be expanded by a few lines. (Not a lot, just a few)

Kilarin
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Post by Ferno »

It's not bad actually. If I want to give the post a quick once over, I can do that quickly. When I want to get more in-depth, I usually read the quote in it's entirety. the expand feature gives me that choice.

I've come to accept it as is.
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Post by KoolBear »

It should be easy to open it to 4-5 lines or maybe 8-10.

Tetrad, what is wrong with the scroll bar in IE? Not much can be done with scroll bars. I can change the colors maybe that would help, oh wait you don't like colored scroll bars either. Ideas suggesttions anyone?

KB
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Post by DCrazy »

I'm using IE right now and I have not experienced any bugs with scrolling and the new quote boxes; when the mouse is over a collapsed scrolling box, the scroll wheel scrolls that box. When it is over an expanded or uncollapsible box, it scrolls the entire page. Standard behavior for all webpages.
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Post by D3Hack »

I don't have any problems with it either, and I'm using IE. I do agree that the threshold should be increased, or the behavior removed entirely. I usually find it more of a nuisance than anything else.

But... I don't post here that much, so... :)
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Post by Tetrad »

I didn't mean specifically IE, I meant i.e. as in "specifically".

And I was talking about what fyrephlie mentioned, with the iframe-esque feature stopping scrolling when the wheel is over the collapsed quote. I know that behavior is the way things work with the mouse cursor over the subwindow dictating what gets scrolled, but it just breaks flow when you're reading a long thing. Would much prefer if it was just show/hide without the scroll bar.
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Post by MD-2389 »

If you ask me, instead of expanding it to a given lineset, expand it to a given percentage of the viewer's resolution.
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Post by fyrephlie »

my post about the scroll bars in ie was in that in ie i get both horizontal and vertical scroll bars in the windowed browser, which take up THE WHOLE DAMN QUOTE!!! making it so you can't even see 'some of' what was quoted. i don't get that on this box (firefox running on *nix) instead i get a little white rectangle that doesnt even resemble a scroll bar.... but with large overlapping that are larger than the quote box the scrolling gets annoying.

i wouldn't mind if i didn't look at all the quotes all the damn time, and i suppose i am just erked by having to click a lot of expands (and sub expands too... ugh)

i dunno, i guess i just like it the way it was. but i can certainly learn to accept it i suppose. :roll:
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Post by roid »

If i choose to skim a thread i often rely on quotes to point out what is the heart of the discussion. The number & size of the quotes gives off the "vibe" of the thread (eg: a thread engaging in pedantics may have large posts containing a lot of small quotes. Or a thread with people arguing over things they don't actually know much about may contain many large quotes of entire articles).
I never really thought of how much i rely on the non-verbal info i get from quotes until the system was messed with.

i'm never one to look a gift feature in the mouth though. so an option to turn the feature on/off would be appreciated
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Post by Top Gun »

I didn't mean to come across as complaining; I think that the feature is great in principle, and I'm sure that a lot of people find it very useful. I just happen to have terrible short-term memory. :P If I don't see the whole quote tree after each post, I usually forget the entire thread of the conversation, particularly if the quote in question is appearing a while after the original post. Even if the line limit were increased, I'd still end up expanding most of the posts, just because I prefer seeing the entire conversation (although I will admit that expanding the limit would be very helpful). This is especially true in E&C, where quotes can end up getting quite lengthly during important conversations. The scroll-wheel issue has already tripped me up a few times, and I've also noticed a few instances further down a page where a particularly long post doesn't have the expansion option at all. If there is a way to add an option to the profile to automatically expand all quotes, then I'm all for it. If it's too much of a bother, then don't worry about it; increasing the line limit will probably take care of most of the issues, and I'll just diligently click the Expand button the rest of the time. :P
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Post by Kyouryuu »

For what it's worth, I'd like to add that it drives me nuts. Rather than ditching it, I'd rather have a button for "Expand Quotes by Default." :lol:
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