Highlight parts of a post that have been quoted in a reply

Feature
21

Took a reasonable amount of time to write and post … it was a direct reply to you.

It was Easter I reposted … after six days had passed?

Hilarious that you have a problem with the way I am interacting, that is possibly one of the most hypocritical things ever written.

Your train set … I’ll leave you to play.

Wish you all well though.

2 Likes
22

Have fun highlighting stuff elsewhere! I look forward to seeing how “massive” it becomes!

23

I love that I had this same idea today, search here and find an interesting discussion about it :wink:

I see this would makes sense for a plugin initially, as a way to perform more actions to highlighted text on top of the current “quote reply”.

Like or share a portion of a message can be useful in some contexts, I see the value of having a non-visual-intrusive way (yeah maybe green is too much) to identify a portion of a long text that the community has identified as interesting or quoted a lot.

Medium’s take on highlights

The way I see it, as a user I would be interested when reading a post to read comments related with a specific portion of the text without having to jump down and up, in context. But, maybe this is more annotations than just highlights.

1 Like
24

As a plugin this is fine, but we have no plans to work on it

3 Likes
25

Keep us up to date, if someone writes a plugin :slight_smile:

I could imagine lots of benefits. But the highlighting should be possible outside the composer and has to be in first place user specific, so anyone will be able to use Discourse as real (user specific) knowledge base :wink:

And in second place the author should have another color for global highlightings exclusively for his/her posts.

PS: It would be stupid, if highlights would affect the version history of an post.

1 Like
26

I’m very interested in a highlighting feature à la medium, though more basic. Could you clarify whether the team has any interest in adding any of the following features into core (whether as PR or from the team itself) and if not, whether you’d be willing to support a plugin in core should it be required:

  1. Adding a “Highlight” button next to the “Quote” button. Pressing this button would add a very light yellow background to the selected text. Every time another user presses the button for the same text, the yellow background becomes a bit more saturated.
  2. Making it so the pressing the quote button also does what the highlight button does (in addition to its core function).
  3. Adding “Highlights” as a tab to user activities, listing links to all posts a user highlighted
  4. Adding a user setting that hides all highlights by other users (this could probably be done via a custom theme, if the necessary classes are provided in #1 above)
  5. Making it so that clicking into a highlighted text gives you a popup listing the avatars of all users who highlighted that text segment.
  6. Add an admin settng that disallows highlighting on a per topic and per category basis. (Or, perhaps better, which hides other users’ highlights permanently while still allowing users tho add highlights for themselves.)

I would not want to notify anyone about highlights and neither should highlighting count as a revision of the post. Any logged in user can highlight anything.

7 Likes
27

All of these are plugin territory.

As for…[quote=“tophee, post:26, topic:39097”]
whether you’d be willing to support a plugin in core should it be required
[/quote]

The answer to that is usually yes unless the changes required are really intrusive.

1 Like