Disallow Posts that have only a Quote

[Alpha1]

Many new members try posting on the forum and hit the quote button and then accidentally submit.
I think it would be useful to show the same error message that is shown to users who try to submit an empty post:

Oops something went wrong...

• Your post only contains a quote and no message. Your post cannot be submitted.

 

[Sim]

We have plenty of members who don't understand how to use BBCode and after quoting a message, will reply inline (sometimes using bold or different colours to differentiate between their text and the original), which leaves their reply part of the quote when posted - it is very annoying.

I'm not sure "Please enter a valid message" is sufficiently informative to help them understand what the problem is - not sure if it can be detected that the message consists of only a quote and give a more meaningful error?

 

[Alpha1]

You are right. A better message would be:

Oops something went wrong...

• Your post only contains a quote and no message. Your post cannot be submitted.

 

[Xon]

@Alfa1 my (paid) Post Friction add-on actually implements something like this via it's soft-wordcount minimum. It strips quotes & bbcode, and then counts the number of words. (My problem is people quote +10000 word posts and say "great" or "more")

It would need adjusting to target the 'all quote and no post' behaviour.

 

[Mr Lucky]

You are right. A better message would be:

Oops something went wrong...

• Your post only contains a quote and no message. Your post cannot be submitted.

Great suggestion but this amendment is getting likes that are going to be dilute the like for your first post (important for getting the suggestion taken on board I think), I would edit that change into the first post if you can.

 

[Yugensoft]

@Alfa1
Seems that since this is a plain text-matching problem, it could be done with regex. So if there's interest I'll do a free "Regex Post Guard" add-on.

Then it could be used to block any form of "corrupt" post being made. You'd only have to craft an appropriate regex expression, or ask a computer-savvy individual to do it for you, and add it to your list, alongside whatever warning error you wanted. Much easier to type in a regex expression than do a separate add-on for each type of corrupt post.

 

[Alpha1]

The key is not to just block the post but also teach the member what he is doing wrong and how to correct it.
Which means that each such regex rule requires a unique error message.

 

[Yugensoft]

The key is not to just block the post but also teach the member what he is doing wrong and how to correct it.
Which means that each such regex rule requires a unique error message.

Yes that would be straightforward.

 

[Yugensoft]

Many new members try posting on the forum and hit the quote button and then accidentally submit.
I think it would be useful to show the same error message that is shown to users who try to submit an empty post:

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/post-guard.5695/

The regex for that specific case is listed in the FAQ