Automatically removed quote of whole previous post

Is there some way to have the D&D system-bot relax a bit in its over-zealous removal of quoted passages? Quotes provide context and when the quotes are deleted, one loses context. The inclusion of an entire post naturally happens when that post is short. In a series of short posts, one often wishes to respond to a particular post and therefore needs to quote it for context.

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This is a new feature in Discourse :grin:

The quoted reply is removed only when doing a full post quote of the immediately preceeding post. This is quite reasonable as the referenced text is already directly above the response.

Partial quotes are never removed.

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Full post quote anywhere else is also retained :grinning:

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In such cases it is often best to reply in a single post with many quoted replies instead of separate replies to each post.

Many short replies seldom a conversation make :yum:

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This new feature is not useful to me and is annoying. I have bad eyesight and use large text to read. This means that I can only show a limited amount of text on the screen.

The space between two posts is larger than the re-quoted post, which makes reading harder for me since I have to scroll more. This is an accessibility bug. It is not a feature.

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Karl, I sympathise with you, my eyesight is slowly diminishing too and I also use larger font size, which means I can rarely see a post on screen in its entirety (I’m using a smartphone right now and I can only just see your entire reply above as I write).

The space between two posts is larger then a duplicated single line reply, that is true, but there are also cases when people reply with a full quote to a much lengthier posts and in those cases the longer text is duplicated and eats up much larger portions of the screen.

I believe some readers might find this even more annoying, as it definitely breaks the flow of the conversation.

So there is no easy win with this one: one might have to scroll a tiny bit more, when a previous post is short (because of an extra gap between posts) but one might have to scroll a lot more, when long quote is duplicated right after the original post.

What do you think?

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I prefer very short quotes, since long ones take up the whole screen, and feel like they’re getting in the way of the conversation.

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Agreed, but the issue with the system removing the quoted text only applies when replying with a full quote of a preceeding post (basically duplicating an entire post) right at the beginning of the very next post.

In all other cases (short or long or partial) quotes are retained.

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I think this should be a user preference with the default set to current behavior. I could not find such a preference, therefore was hoping for another solution. I can certainly painstakingly not copy entire quotes, however that seemed a bit contrived. The Discourse third-party application is in general not very accessible, so it is not surprising that a feature was added without accessibility considerations.

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Indeed, it is a forum wide setting, as it affects all users who cannot hide the “double posts” when they are entered in this way by others.

But this is only a marginal case, I have skimmed your posts from this week and this only seemed to happen once after the new version of Discourse was implemented?

There are a lot of partial quotes in your posts and they are all retained exactly as intended.

Purging is only in effect for the new posts after the recent upgrade, which can be seen in this old reply here, where the quoted two lines take up even more space than the gap between two posts (when seen on mobile) :yum:

I’m sad to hear that the Discourse app is difficult for you to use, but the developers of Discourse are quite friendly and responsive to user input, maybe you could give them some pointers as where to direct their effort.

See replies from the staff members in this topic:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/accessibility-assistive-technology-support/1182/36

I hope they will hear your concerns and make their software even friendlier for you, as I really enjoy all the content and additional features you provide for the entire community here :heart: :heart_eyes:

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Ahhhhhhhh! OK. Then for the benefit of others, I shall happily take this extra effort. The automatic removal was interesting the first time it happened, but annoying the second time.

I can use it very well now. When I go blind in the other eye, I would have to stop posting.

Thank you for providing this link. I have submitted this issue.

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