Quoting Improvement

[Sal Collaziano]

In all my XenForo communities, I have many people who post a message that includes a quote - but then just submits the quote and posts again with their response to the quote.

My suggestion is to have the system see that when a message is being quoted - if there's no other data in the message - pop-up a box that states something like, "You must reply to the message you're quoting before submitting your message".

This would save me a lot of time from reports of messages with, well, no message - and then merging the two posts... I'm assuming this happens at other sites - and those who have busier forums or multiples like I do, would appreciate this fix.

 

[Sal Collaziano]

Did everyone miss this or am I the only one who has lots of instances of this? I run a bunch of XF forums so perhaps it's an issue unique to my situation.

 

[Mendalla]

Not something I have seen, to be honest. I have a couple folks who can't quote properly to save their souls, but their problem goes much deeper than this. Do you allow editing after posting? We do for half an hour so even someone did this through a slip of the finger could edit to add their comments. And I can't see why this could be anything other than a finger slip unless you have a lot of inexperienced forum users on your sites.

Not saying it is a bad idea, just not sure how widespread is the problem you are trying to fix. If most people's experience is like mine, that would explain the lack of response.

 

[benFF]

Yes I get this happening quite a lot too.

 

[Mr Lucky]

It has happened a couple of times from people who have not used a forum. I just changed the phrase Reply to Quote & Reply - solved the issue for me. Alternatively if you have a forum where it happens a lot you could have some kind of onboarding course for newbies (there are addons I believe) - they can then learn some other good stuff they might not otherwise realise.

 

[zappaDPJ]

I've seen that happen multiple times but I've also seen people post a quote after they have posted a reply, presumably because they forgot to include the quote.

It seems you can't easily edit a post to add a quote because 'Insert quotes...' is not available on a post edit?

 

[Mendalla]

It seems you can't easily edit a post to add a quote because 'Insert quotes...' is not available on a post edit?

Yeah, it seems to me that if you Quote or Reply while editing an existing post it still goes to the new post editor at the bottom and then you have to copy the BB quote codes with the quoted text to the one you are editing. Or something like that. I know it's a bit kludgy anyhow.

 

[Mr Lucky]

It seems you can't easily edit a post to add a quote because 'Insert quotes...' is not available on a post edit?

Yes, for me that is more of an issue,

 

[alfaNova]

I am using post reply addon instead of quote and I am so happy with that

 

[MaximilianKohler]

It has happened a couple of times from people who have not used a forum. I just changed the phrase Reply to Quote & Reply - solved the issue for me.

Good tip! I'm using the free "reply to user" addon https://xenforo.com/community/resources/cxf-reply-to-user.6328/, and the phrase is reply_to, /admin.php?phrases/reply_to.10746/edit&language_id=1.

 

[Walter]

Happens a lot.

 

[Sal Collaziano]

Not something I have seen, to be honest. I have a couple folks who can't quote properly to save their souls, but their problem goes much deeper than this. Do you allow editing after posting? We do for half an hour so even someone did this through a slip of the finger could edit to add their comments. And I can't see why this could be anything other than a finger slip unless you have a lot of inexperienced forum users on your sites.

Not saying it is a bad idea, just not sure how widespread is the problem you are trying to fix. If most people's experience is like mine, that would explain the lack of response.

At this point, it seems most people signing up for forums are new to it - being that most people are now used to social media and have either forgotten about forums - or just haven't ever used them before. I do allow editing.

There are so many instances of people submitting a quoted post without entering any further verbiage. It really would be nice for the system to disallow that - as there's no reason for it. If somebody attempts to submit a quoted post without any further interaction, some type of notification telling the user to type their reply in the text box would be really helpful.