I send the highlighted text to the Text to Speech program to avoid eye fatigue. The engine forbids this and the selection disappears. Could you please tell me why and how to fix it?

Could you provide further information please? What do you mean by the engine, how are you sending the text and to what text to speech tool?

Speech has nothing to do with it in this case. Ctrl+A does not work in Discourse forums.

Great, that’s the information that we need in order to help. Ctrl+A only selects the OP rather than the replies as well.

On the ntc.party forum I found a rule for uBlock. It brings back the Ctrl+A work, but breaks the quoting. ntc.party##+js(aopr, getSelection) [image] Hawk: Ctrl+A only selects the OP rather than the replies as well That is, you are prohibiting the text of multiple posts from being selected.

Not only Ctrl+A. Selecting the text of multiple messages with the mouse does not work. The selection disappears and I can’t copy the text (to send it to the TTS engine, but in this case it doesn’t matter what I want to do with the copied text).

Hold the mouse button down (anywhere on the page) while you select all (Ctrl+A) and then copy (Ctrl+C). OR After selecting everything you want with the mouse, try Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C before you release the mouse button.

Yes, these solutions can be used, but it’s not very convenient. I suggest you make changes to the Discourse engine to make selection and copying work in a common way.

Why do you forbid selecting text (by default) in the browser? Is it ethical?

It’s likely not deliberate but there’s certainly nothing unethical about it.

Is there any context as for why it was decided that CMD/CTRL+A would select only the original post? Breaking the default behavior of most apps here seems maybe not unethical but also probably not the correct default and it should be an option instead. Using keyboard shortcut is probably considered …

Cannot Ctrl+A to select and entire topic

Product Support

sam (Sam Saffron) January 15, 2025, 10:59pm 14

Perhaps this was related to this change?

Topic		Replies	Views
At `/new-topic`, "Select All" (Control + A) does not select solely the previewed text, when the previewer's content is selected Feature	0	45	October 9, 2026
Add button to select all text in a preformatted block Feature completed	13	5952	November 25, 2023
Reply to selected text not appearing when last para is selected UX	8	2810	November 24, 2016
Some usability issues noticed by users Bug	1	191	January 24, 2026
Remove overriding of cmd/ctrl-f UX keyboard-shortcuts	34	1588	June 20, 2024

Cannot Ctrl+A to select and entire topic

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