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Suggestion: no ziggurats, please!

5 replies 3607 views

Description

A random thread.

Is is readable, in your opinion?
Most of the posts' content is just 1:1 copy of the post above, building a ziggurat layer by layer:

Please, if possible, add a warning (a soft one, not a hard restriction) when quoting the entire post content of the post immediately above. I know it depends on the discipline of the users, and such a warning could be circumvented (for example, by changing one character in the quote), but I think most of the users just use the "Quote" button and add own response, without doing anything with the original post.
Quoting an entire post, but not the immediately above one, or a part (a paragraph or a sentence) from the post above is okay.

Description by

Trang Oul

Can be used to make Runewords:

Trang Oul `1009`

4 years ago (pre-Resurrected)

A random thread.

Is is readable, in your opinion?
Most of the posts' content is just 1:1 copy of the post above, building a ziggurat layer by layer:

Fixedby Teebling • 4 years ago•Go to post

I can control the number of nested quotes, think it's currently set at 5. A reduction in that would help free up vertical spaces in instances like this, but then people lose context as the discussion continues and more replies are made.

Alternatively I can give each blockquote its own maximum height, and then have overflow scroll, but that is a pretty crude solution and again means that context is lost where users do not decide to scroll through the entire text.

It's a balancing act between readability and preserving the actual content of the messages. On a site like this where I cannot predict the length or type of content people are quoting there isn't a lot I can really do besides the above two options, which both have their issues.

Back in the day people would courteously <snip> longer quotes to prevent this, but again, I can't really control their behaviour. We've learned that adding warnings everywhere has little to no effect on lazy users, no matter how prominent. Then there is the technical challenge of your proposal, how does the browser detect when the 'full' length of the post has been quoted? Does it count the number of characters and set an arbitrary limit? Does it try to regex match the quoted text until it gets a full match of the text? How does BBcode formatting affect this and how does it treat line breaks? If its simply adding the conditional to the 'quote' button regardless of the length of the post - do people really want to be seeing an extra dialog or warning every time they use it? How would I clone this behaviour to the various ways in which quoting is executed (highlight quote from viewtopic UI, full text quote from viewtopic UI, highlight quote from topic review/editor UI) and get consistent results?

As you can see it's not as easy as it sounds. I have reduced nested quotes to a maximum of 3 for now, just to make a bit of a difference without reinventing the wheel. It won't affect existing ziggurats but will for future posts starting from now. It's your forum guys, if you want to discourage people from quoting the entire Rosetta Stone then just send them a polite PM reminding them of this basic etiquette.

Teebling `8401`Admin

4 years ago (pre-Resurrected)

This post was marked as the fix.

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Trang Oul `1009`

4 years ago (pre-Resurrected)

Thank you.

As I expected, there is no easy technical solution. But I have another idea: is it possible to make quotes collapsible, so by default only the new content is displayed (configurable in user settings, maybe by default for quotes exceeding n lines)? That'd not make the posts shorter (in DB), but more readable.
I also don't want to act as a bad cop and remind everyone, that's why I thought about a technical solution.

Teebling `8401`Admin

4 years ago (pre-Resurrected)

Trang Oul wrote: 4 years ago
But I have another idea: is it possible to make quotes collapsible, so by default only the new content is displayed (configurable in user settings, maybe by default for quotes exceeding n lines)?

Reading over my first response to you I think I was just being a bit stubborn and reading into your question too much

Yes, I could potentially make a small 'read more' link for quoted messages when it meets the following:

Is over n chars in length (not sure about lines, but possible)
Is nested within another blockquote (guarantees that only the top 2 'floors' of the ziggurat are affected)

Ideally I'd run that ^ before PHP processes the code for rendering the blockquote if I can work out how phpBB does that. To know if someone had read it already (if that is what you mean by 'new') would make it even smarter, good suggestion, but that would require querying 4 tables just to get a true/false for each quote - not performant, or at least I know I'm not good enough to make a query like that performant lol.

Having it as an opt-out control panel setting might work, for those who want it. I'm concerned about posts/replies being taken out of context because only the first few lines are visible. Would test anyways.

Trang Oul wrote: 4 years ago
I also don't want to act as a bad cop and remind everyone, that's why I thought about a technical solution.

No worries, your suggestions are welcome here.

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Teebling `8401`Admin

4 years ago (pre-Resurrected)

Donate diablo2.io administrator • Development Log • Site Tips & Tricks

Trang Oul `1009`

4 years ago (pre-Resurrected)

Teebling wrote: 4 years ago
Reading over my first response to you I think I was just being a bit stubborn and reading into your question too much Yes, I could potentially make a small 'read more' link for quoted messages when it meets the following:

(...)

Ideally I'd run that ^ before PHP processes the code for rendering the blockquote if I can work out how phpBB does that. To know if someone had read it already (if that is what you mean by 'new') would make it even smarter, good suggestion, but that would require querying 4 tables just to get a true/false for each quote - not performant, or at least I know I'm not good enough to make a query like that performant lol.

If the performance is at stake, I'd leave the code as is, at least now. The site stability improved significantly over the last weeks, and I'd not risk making it sluggish again.

Teebling wrote: 4 years ago
I have reduced nested quotes to a maximum of 3 for now, just to make a bit of a difference without reinventing the wheel.

Do we really need such a hardcode? From experience (software dev) I know that such things will backfire, sooner or later.

Teebling wrote: 4 years ago

LOL
If you (ever) implement the collapsing, please also consider doing the same for quoted images (besides quotes exceeding certain length), as above - if it's possible to detect image tag.