The discussion is about adding a “Highlight and share” feature to Discourse forums, similar to the one on Medium and Product Hunt. kam44 proposed this idea and codinghorror initially disagreed, suggesting that sharing the URL to the post is sufficient. However, sam suggested that this feature could be useful for anonymous users who cannot quote.
It appears that the feature has since been implemented by pmusaraj and is now available in the core. It is enabled by default for anonymous users, but can be enabled for all users via the share quote visibility site setting. The feature allows users to share highlighted text on Twitter, Email, or Facebook.
jord8on noticed the feature on the Discourse Meta Community and is interested in implementing it on their own forums. pmusaraj explained that the feature is available in the tests-passed branch and can be enabled via site settings. However, it is currently disabled on mobile devices due to native share functionalities.
Why? You can simply share the URL to the post. Every Discourse post and topic has OpenGraph / oEmbed tags so it will display appropriately, with an automatic excerpt. Try pasting a link to a Discourse post in Facebook or Twitter to see what I mean. Like so
This would also make quoting more confusing, and elevate the rare use case – “I need to share just this third paragraph of the post” – above the simple use case – “I need to share this post”.
One area that I think this would not be super confusing is if it was an “anonymous” user feature, anon can not quote anyway and this would make it easier for them to “share” a quote from the forum.
That said I agree, explore this first in a plugin.