The discussion revolves around improving the UX for external quotes in Discourse. erlend_sh suggests that external quotes should include the topic title to differentiate them from quotes within the same topic. codinghorror initially thinks the current design is correct, but later agrees that adding the topic title is a good idea. sam shares a related issue from the SmartThings forum, where the click target for external quotes is too small.
The conversation touches on the rarity of quoting from external topics, but erlend_sh argues that showing context (topic title) is important when quoting from an external topic. codinghorror suggests that showing the category might be too much, but agrees that the topic title should suffice.
sam shares his work on patching up the issue and notes that the code path for linking and quoting off-topic is identical. He also mentions several related issues, including the need for a more robust quote format and support for quoting secure topics. codinghorror ultimately agrees with erlend_sh that adding the topic title is a good idea.
Currently when I’m quoting a post from a different topic, it looks nearly identical to quotes from within the same topic:
I think external quotes should be more similar to the embed you get from a single-line topic link, more like this:
I simply added an “in” after the post author and then include the topic title.
(slightly confusing example since the top-most quote is technically also an external one, but manually added. That was mere coincidence so please disregard it)
Yeah, this was raised in smart things forum as well, also the click target is tiny now
Is this a bug? The arrow should point up if the quote is from the same topic.
Here is a quote from this topic. Note the arrow at upper right.
Here is a quote from a different topic. Note the arrow at upper right.
Nope @erlend_sh this looks correct to me. Up arrow meaning “quote is from above in the same topic” right arrow meaning “quote is from other topic”.
Okay, let me rephrase: They look nearly identical. The arrow is a fine additional clue, but I want to add the topic title as a much clearer callout that says “This quote is from a different topic”.
Does this (and by this I mean selective quoting of posts in other topics) really happen enough for it to matter?
Subtle cues might be fine for rare actions.
See
The complaint is that there is only one tiny arrow to click, when stuff is in another topic repeating the title and making linkable seems rather sane
Another argument in favour: It makes a lot of sense to show context (topic title) when quoting from an external topic.
Maybe, but showing category is a bit much. Should we also show all the tags? I think the topic title should suffice, if we do anything at all here, @sam.
I agree that quoting off topic is not terribly common, however linking off topic by simply pasting a link is common enough.
The code path for linking off topic and quoting off topic is pretty much identical, in both case we use the same renderer:
[quote="codinghorror, post:3, topic:13999"]
Yeah there is still a lot of work to do in this area cc: @eviltrout
[/quote]
https://meta.discourse.org/t/when-moving-posts-links-quotes-that-were-moved-too-dont-get-updated/13999/3?u=sam
I started patching this up here:
I do feel this is ripe for a review when we move to the new Markdown engine
Preview don’t work right cause of Zalgo API
The whole quote format is not robust enough to handle topic moves.
We do not support the ability to quote (or onebox) secure topics and get title expansions cause applying security is a nightmare. (do all the users looking at this topic have permission to see the other topic? very hard to answer)
This ?
Sure, I like that, just the topic I can get behind. Good idea @erlend_sh.
