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Thom Revor

Alrighty, so here's the second post dealing with quotes, and the issues with them. Also the neat things.

On 3/6/2016 at 3:21 AM, Matoyak said:

Quotes

Speaking of quoting, there's some wacky stuff going on with this at the moment as well. In the forum you have three options to quote people: The first I do not recommend if possible, and that is to click the " button in the WYSIWYG editor. It will drop a quote box into the forum like so:

The reason I do not recommend using this is within the quote. It doesn't create any information that helps give context to the quote, such as who said it, when they said it, etc. It also does not link back to the original post like the other methods do. You should only really use this method if you are quoting someone outside of the forums, such as Dan Shive or Shigeru Miyamoto or Frank Sinatra or someone.

By default the forum currently is only showing one level of nesting when quoting another post. This is problematic, as I will demonstrate later. First let's clarify what I mean by "nesting" anyways (most users will know what this means, but eh, might as well play it safe).

The other options for quoting are to hit the quote button on a post, or to hit the "+" button, which will create a list of all the posts you click this plus on while reading a particular forum thread. (It could possibly work across multiple threads, but I haven't tried that out just yet. I'll do so in a bit and edit this post with the results). The benefits of doing it this way is that it captures the context of the original post. I will create a second post to further discuss quotes immediately after this one, in order to better demonstrate the issues the forum has with quotes, and the nifty things it can do with them as well.

    Let's deal with the cool stuff first. I created this quote by hitting the quote button, and you'll notice that in the header of the quote there is a time stamp, my name, and a little arrow thing on the left and the right. If you click that right arrow, it will take you to the post directly. This is what I mean when I say it "captures the context of the post" (I'm not the best with words, y'see, and I dunno how else to describe that). Notice that the manually created ones in the previous post don't have the right arrow? No linkback info, no name or time...means no context. Additionally, if you click the name of the person being quoted, it'll take you to their profile page as you'd expect. The left arrow seems to take you to the start of the topic. EDIT: Nope, this is incorrect. The left arrow will open and close the quote box itself. Super nice! I was middle-clicking, thinking it was a link).

    Now here's the issue: As it currently stands (On March 6, 2016 at 3:35AM Central Time), the forums only show ONE level of nesting. If you look at my quote here, you'll see there are no other quotes contained within. This is a pretty serious problem if you're quoting someone's post with lots of quotes in it, huh?* It means there's no context for what they're saying in it! Huh. How can we get around that, I wonder?

    Another neat thing is that you can drag quotes around within the editor as you wish. Just click on the handle in the upper-left of the quote box and drag around. (You will have to do so if you wish to add comments before the first quote when utilizing the multiquote feature). This will allow us to nest quotes manually. I've quoted my own post a few times here in order to showcase what I mean:

On 3/6/2016 at 3:21 AM, Matoyak said:
On 3/6/2016 at 3:21 AM, Matoyak said:

Oh goodness me, look at this nesting! AND we have the context and linkback information too!

Good golly gosh, ain't that something.

    So the answer to our conundrum at the moment is to use multiquote to grab every previous post in a chain, quote them all, then drag them inside of each quote ourselves. Not the most user-friendly way of handling things, but it's what we've got at the moment.

* Here's an example of a post where Someone else is using multiquote, and them I'm quoting them and additionally using multiquote. Someone else then goes on to quote my post. It becomes a nightmare of clicking around, trying to figure out what each part of a previous quote is referring to.

On 3/6/2016 at 3:21 AM, Matoyak said:

Speaking of quoting, there's some wacky stuff going on with this at the moment as well. In the forum you have three options to quote people: The first I do not recommend if possible, and that is to click the " (quote) button in the WYSIWYG editor. It will drop a quote box into the forum like so:

Quote

I do be a quote! I have no name, timestamp, or linkback information though, which makes me hard to keep context around. :(

    The reason I do not recommend using this is within the quote. It doesn't create any information that helps give context to the quote, such as who said it, when they said it, etc. It also does not link back to the original post like the other methods do. You should only really use this method if you are quoting someone outside of the forums, such as Dan Shive or Shigeru Miyamoto or Frank Sinatra or someone.

    By default the forum currently is only showing one level of nesting when quoting another post. This is problematic, as I will demonstrate later. First let's clarify what I mean by "nesting" anyways (most users will know what this means, but eh, might as well play it safe).

Quote
Quote

I am a nested quote!

I am a quote. Neither of us have names, times, or linkback info though, still. We are sad about this.

    The other options for quoting are to hit the quote button on a post, or to hit the "+" button, which will create a list of all the posts you click this plus on while reading a particular forum thread. (It could possibly work across multiple threads, but I haven't tried that out just yet. I'll do so in a bit and edit this post with the results). The benefits of doing it this way is that it captures the context of the original post. I will create a second post to further discuss quotes immediately after this one, in order to better demonstrate the issues the forum has with quotes, and the nifty things it can do with them as well.

Thom Revor

Linking Content

    So the forums seem to have some nifty automatic rendering built into them. If you link another post, it will paste a visual of that post and a link to it right here in the one we're looking at. Like so:

Or like so for twitter:

    Neat, eh? They're a bit visually cumbersome at the moment (They are HUGE, taking up way more room than is necessary, while not utilizing that space when it would be helpful), but quite a neat feature. In the next post, I'll go into more about quoting. In the meantime, I'm going to share a browser extension that saved my bacon with this post, and that I suspect a LOT of y'all will find helpful: Lazarus: Form Recovery (Firefox Based Browsers) and Lazarus: Form Recovery (Chromium Based Browsers). Legit saved my bacon on this post.

Thom Revor

Emoticons

This is a bit of a silly, easy to figure out thing, but while I'm here... Text auto converts to smileys. ":)" becomes :). Unless you add punctuation around it like so: :). Then it is treated as pure text. (You can overcome this by just inserting the smileys from the WYSIWYG bar, or by adding a space and then backspacing).

Thom Revor

Quoting

Speaking of quoting, there's some wacky stuff going on with this at the moment as well. In the forum you have three options to quote people: The first I do not recommend if possible, and that is to click the " (quote) button in the WYSIWYG editor. It will drop a quote box into the forum like so:

Quote

I do be a quote! I have no name, timestamp, or linkback information though, which makes me hard to keep context around. :(

    The reason I do not recommend using this is within the quote. It doesn't create any information that helps give context to the quote, such as who said it, when they said it, etc. It also does not link back to the original post like the other methods do. You should only really use this method if you are quoting someone outside of the forums, such as Dan Shive or Shigeru Miyamoto or Frank Sinatra or someone.

    By default the forum currently is only showing one level of nesting when quoting another post. This is problematic, as I will demonstrate later. First let's clarify what I mean by "nesting" anyways (most users will know what this means, but eh, might as well play it safe).

Quote
Quote

I am a nested quote!

I am a quote. Neither of us have names, times, or linkback info though, still. We are sad about this.

    The other options for quoting are to hit the quote button on a post, or to hit the "+" button, which will create a list of all the posts you click this plus on while reading a particular forum thread. (It could possibly work across multiple threads, but I haven't tried that out just yet. I'll do so in a bit and edit this post with the results). The benefits of doing it this way is that it captures the context of the original post. I will create a second post to further discuss quotes immediately after this one, in order to better demonstrate the issues the forum has with quotes, and the nifty things it can do with them as well.

 

Thom Revor

Tagging

Next let's talk tagging people. This works like most other social media sites, just hit the @ symbol and type out the name of the person you wish to tag. A list of forum members will pop up, and you can select the person from that list. This will (depending on their notification settings) either send a notification via the in-forum system, the web browser, or as an email. (Liking and quoting will do this as well). An example of this is in the opening paragraph where I tagged @Robin.

Thom Revor

Vertical Spacing

Originally from Matoyak

  In the current version of the editor, when you hit the "enter" key, a new line is created between where you were and where you will be typing next. Like so:

: see? That empty space cannot be typed in. (In some forum software this white space distance is configurable on the admin side, so this could change later). Basically, if you want to separate out paragraphs of text you only have to hit enter once, not twice as on the previous forum. But what if you want a new line, only without the extra vertical whitespace? Hit "shift+enter" to get a carriage return like so:
: see? Note that because of the way the paragraphs seem to be working that certain formatting options (text align, mostly) will apply to entire paragraphs of text...which includes everything from the previous new line to the next new line. If you use shift+enter this does not create a new paragraph.

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