Quote post from closed topic

Feature
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Someone just opened a followup on a closed topic. I wanted to quote one of the post in that closed topic to support why I think the person should not have opened another topic.

But… turns out you can select text in a closed topic, but the quote button won’t appear. The editor is also hidden.

Of course this makes sense within that closed topic. But it’s not a very uncommon thing to quote from a closed topic into another topic.

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2

I guess we could change the button to Quote Reply as linked Topic for closed topics.

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4

No need, highlight the text, then click the Reply as linked Topic, it will behave as expected.

I think the reason we don’t see this is because as mods/admins we can reply to closed topics…

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5

Or show the button whenever the composer is already open, but not when it would need to open the composer.

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6

Where do you see Reply as linked Topic when highlighting a text in a closed topic?

meta-discourse.gif914×496 83.7 KB

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I see… But intuitively one is used to select text and to expect a blue button next to that selection to make a quote. Now it turns out that - only - for closed topics that won’t happen and you need to do something else.

That is counter-intuitive.

Besides, the link ‘Reply as linked topic’ takes the whole post, not just the part you wanted. Not handy for long posts.

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… in other words, it doesn’t actually work like described.

(Described here:

)

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Seems to be because the topic is closed. It works properly on this topic (since it is open), but it fails to work when in a closed topic. I just did several tests here on Meta to discover that.

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11

So, there are two things here:

  1. highlighting text in a closed topic and choosing Reply as linked Topic will quote the whole post instead of just the highlighted part. This is a bug if it should be as @codinghorror suggested. On the other hand, a link to the right of a post indicates it’s about the whole post. While a button next to highlighted text is clearly only meant for that text.

  2. everywhere on Discourse you can select text and a button to quote will appear. Not on closed topics. This is counter intuitive

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Yeah this is a minor bug … @eviltrout can we fix the closed topic behavior for reply as linked post, when text is highlighted in a closed topic? If it is a lot of work, never mind.

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Yup that’s not too hard:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/298098745ee43128b18918b161f9669c04dde212

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