#3: "Reply with quote" function

Contents
  1. Motivation
  2. Proposal
by Jon Stahl — last modified Jan 22, 2010 06:30 AM

Ploneboard would benefit from a simple "reply with quote" function that enables a user to seed their response with text from a previous message.

Proposed by
Jon Stahl, ONE/Northwest
Seconded by
Marshall Mayer, LiveModern.com
Proposal type
User interface
Assigned to release
State
completed

Motivation

Much as in email, forum users often wish to respond to a particular point in another person's post. It enhances readabilty to allow users to easily "quote" other replies in their posts.

Proposal

Add a "reply with quote" button, which initiates a new reply, but pre-populates it with the text of the reply that is being replied to. Quoted text should be automatically formatted as <blockquote>.

Most forum software offers this functionality -- look at any install of phpBB to see how it works.

+1

Posted by Alexander Limi at Oct 19, 2005 05:13 AM
I agree that this should be available. The only HTML tag that would be let through would be the blockquote one - both because it makes sense to do selective quoting of longer posts, and because it introduces no complexity for the user as such.

I originally planned to have this in Ploneboard by default, that's why there is a Reply button on every post.

+1

Posted by Florian Schulze at Oct 29, 2005 10:59 AM
Yep, this should be added.

HTML vs. Plain Text

Posted by Martin Aspeli at Jun 28, 2006 07:53 AM
So we agree on this, but how does it work in reality? There are four combinations:

1. Parent uses HTML/kupu, reply uses HTML/kupu
2. Parent uses HTML/kupu, reply uses plain text (e.g. browser doesn't support kupu)
3. Parent uses plain text, reply uses HTML/kupu
4. Parent uses plain text, reply uses plain text

We need to decide which algorithm to use for quoting in each of those cases: Do we wrap and insert '>' at the beginning of each line? Do we use a <blockquote>? Do we live with a <blockquote> even in plain text (kind of like nabble.com does now, but it's not very friendly)? How well does kupu handle the case when you want to insert some non-quoted reply text in the middle of a <blockquote>, but have the rest of the quote continue?

Once we decide this, the implementation is trivial.

Decision

Posted by Martin Aspeli at Jun 28, 2006 08:25 PM
Seems we settled on <blockquote> being used, even in plain-text. Implementing now.