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Quoting is hard
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Quoting is hard

(1) By J. King (jking) on 2020-03-13 12:12:30 [link] [source]

Maybe I've simply missed how, but so far I've found quoting of excerpts prohibitively difficult. Particularly on a pocket computer it's downright exhausting since the text-entry widget zooms out rather than in when I go to type.

Coming from a mailing list (and from Ars Technica, where quoting messages is also considered good form), I suspect I'll find this not only a disincentive to write, but a difficulty in keeping up with the trail of a discussion.

(2) By Richard Hipp (drh) on 2020-03-13 12:31:06 in reply to 1 [link] [source]

I've found quoting of excerpts prohibitively difficult

When using Markdown, you simply copy/paste the piece you want to quote, and precede the quoted text with a single ">". So, the Markdown text for this reply starts like this:


> I've found quoting of excerpts prohibitively difficult

When using Markdown, you simply copy/paste the piece you want to quote,
and precede the quoted text with a single ">".  So, the Markdown text for
this reply starts like this:

(3) By J. King (jking) on 2020-03-13 12:54:12 in reply to 2 [source]

When using Markdown, you simply copy/paste the piece you want to quote, and precede the quoted text with a single ">".

Yes, and in trying to quote your one paragraph, Richard, it took over a minute of poking at my touchscrren because text is microscopic. And that was only one paragraph. Note that I had already quoted elsewhere, so I was not asking how, but rather saying that the forum as rendered in my browser (Firefox for Android) makes it almost impossible to quote someone else. Here's a screenshot for reference:

screenshot

What makes it doubly hard is that there is no margin to the left of the textarea. Tapping precisely at the extreme edge of a touchscreen is harder than tapping elsewhere, making manually prefixing lines (as well as selecting the whole line) extremely fiddly.

My suggestions:

  • Add some left/right margin to the textarea
  • Scale the textarea down on mobile (I think that should help)
  • Have a dedicated "quote" function in addition to "reply" which will quote the message in full for easier editing

(4) By Warren Young (wyoung) on 2020-03-13 13:43:26 in reply to 3 [link] [source]

it took over a minute of poking at my touchscrren because text is microscopic

Try pressing and swiping on the space bar on your on-screen keyboard. With iOS and some Android setups, this moves the cursor with finer control than you get with simply poking at the screen directly.

If you're on a device without this affordance, there may be alternate methods.

Add some left/right margin to the textarea

It's purposely minimized because mobile usually equates to "small screen," thus real estate is precious.

Have a dedicated "quote" function in addition to "reply" which will quote the message in full for easier editing

We have experience with what happens when you do that from email: many people leave the whole message quoted, thus including a redundant copy in each reply.

And those that do trim quotes have to do the work of trimming the quote, which is more work than selecting the one bit you actually need and copy-pasting it.

Given that Fossil's forum feature makes it basically impossible for a reply to become disconnected from its parent, there is no need for full quoting as there is in email. You can always refer directly to the parent. Quoting is simply a convenience in this medium, usually only needed when replying to a multi-point parent, as in this case.

When there is only one major point in the post you're replying to, quoting isn't needed in a Fossil forum at all. If the reply doesn't seem to make sense on its own, you can just go look at the parent and be enlightened.

(5) By Peter da Silva (resuna) on 2020-03-27 13:37:32 in reply to 4 [link] [source]

And those that do trim quotes have to do the work of trimming the quote, which is more work than selecting the one bit you actually need and copy-pasting it.

Make tap-and-hold on a paragraph copy or select just that paragraph?

(6) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2020-03-27 14:11:05 in reply to 5 [link] [source]

That would change the default behaviour of tap-and-hold, which is (at least on Android keyboards) to select the current word. In my experience, sites which change otherwise global default behaviours are annoying to use. i recently integrated a fancy JSON editor into one of my web apps and it changes tap-and-hold behaviour in a way its developers presumably think is helpful but which only annoys me to no end by effectively disabling the standard select-current-word feature.

(7) By anonymous on 2020-03-29 21:30:46 in reply to 1 [link] [source]

I agree (although I am not using a pocket computer), and is why I think the source link should be available in the reply form (I mentioned this on the Fossil forum, although nobody seemed to reply to that idea). You can then copy the part of the source that you want to quote, and insert > before each line

(8) By Peter da Silva (resuna) on 2020-03-31 15:37:44 in reply to 6 [link] [source]

Then something similar. Tap and hold can also bring up a menu. Or display a paragraph symbol when you tap on text and have that select the whole paragraph. There are a number of option.