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.
I guess we could change the button to Quote Reply as linked Topic for closed topics.
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…
Or show the button whenever the composer is already open, but not when it would need to open the composer.
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.
… in other words, it doesn’t actually work like described.
(Described here:
)
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.
So, there are two things here:
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.
everywhere on Discourse you can select text and a button to quote will appear. Not on closed topics. This is counter intuitive
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.
Yup that’s not too hard:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/298098745ee43128b18918b161f9669c04dde212
