November 15, 2005

3:52 PM

Quote pony? Whereby a user can quote another post without having to copy/paste and add italics. Gut feeling that if this was easy and feasible it would already exist, but you never know...
posted by fire&wings to feature requests at 3:52 PM (33 comments total)

Try Metafilthy with Firefox.
posted by Roger Dodger at 3:55 PM on November 15, 2005

Metafilthy for Firefox.
posted by Gyan at 3:55 PM on November 15, 2005

Bad idea. In my experience, easy quoting leads to excessive quoting. You end up with those nightmare newsgroup posts, where each message contains two new lines and a thousand lines marked with >. As long as posters have to quote manually, they're more likely to cut and paste only the relevant text.
posted by cribcage at 3:57 PM on November 15, 2005

Um, they still have to select it don't they? That makes it no different than what metafilthy users do. It's as easy to quote an entire comment as a relevant selection no matter which method you choose. Anyone who has an annoying commenting style will be smacked down soon enough. Anyone ever hear from Todd Lokken again? Poor guy.
posted by Roger Dodger at 4:02 PM on November 15, 2005

easy quoting leads to excessive quoting

Yeah this can happen. But if you have a tool like MetaFilthy that links to the quoted content, the quoted text can be really brief. As long as there's a link, you don't have to quote the entire statement. But that doesn't mean everyone would use it that way.

How about a full threaded view?

What??!! Are you crazy like Hitler?

Godwin! I guess that's all from me, good night.
posted by scarabic at 4:06 PM on November 15, 2005

Todd Lokken is alive and well and posting.
posted by Gator at 4:07 PM on November 15, 2005

Yeah I saw Metafilthy. For a site that has a spectacular live preview applet it's surely possible to implement a quote function.
posted by fire&wings at 4:10 PM on November 15, 2005

Anyone good at javascript and care to take a crack at it? I suspect it's probably easy to do in IE and Firefox (sorry Safari). Just highlight text on a page, hit a quote button next to the other shortcut buttons and it ends up in the textarea.
posted by mathowie at 4:14 PM on November 15, 2005

Hmm, the real Todd Lokken and his profile. Must... not... succumb... to... sockpuppets.
posted by Roger Dodger at 4:21 PM on November 15, 2005

Here it be 'splained, Rog.
posted by Gator at 4:24 PM on November 15, 2005

That quoting requires extra effort is a feature. cribcage is on the money.
posted by cortex at 4:31 PM on November 15, 2005

Whaaaaaaaaaaat the hell is that about UN Owen? Is she like fraudmaster flash or is that misinformation? I missed that whole trainwreck.
posted by xmutex at 4:36 PM on November 15, 2005

mathowie: what is it about Safari that makes it hard to implement such things?
posted by teece at 4:37 PM on November 15, 2005

For a site that has a spectacular live preview applet it's surely possible to implement a quote function.

Using add-ons to extend the functionality of the site as you see fit is not only fun but painless!
posted by scarabic at 4:42 PM on November 15, 2005

teece: the current versions of safari don't allow text in textareas to be manipulated in javascript.
posted by mathowie at 5:06 PM on November 15, 2005

This is a bad idea.
posted by dg at 5:51 PM on November 15, 2005

I must state that this is a poor idea. I know writing authoritatively on this makes me look like some sort of know-it-all schmuck, but I have put a lot of thought into what makes on-line communities work as they do, and I think I am far more correct than I am wrong.

First, pull-quoting is not a useful form of communication. It provides only a verbatim record of what was written, and no interpretation of that record. Thus, it adds nothing to the discussion. It is not actively destructive of communication, but it is also not constructive.

What is useful to communication is paraphrasing. When you paraphrase someone's words, you communicate your interpretation of what they said. You demonstrate your understanding of their words, and this assists them in clarifying their message.

Secondly, too-easy pull-quoting encourages users to respond to individual authors too quickly. When users do not read the entirety of a thread, we end up with tiresome situations where the same point is hashed out again and again and again, each time by someone less eloquent than the last.

There's a reason MeFi works well: Matt's design helps encourage silence. By making it take a little work to use the system, we are selecting authors who typically care about what they're saying and care to say it well.

Design changes here must be made cautiously, lest the balance be spoiled.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:03 PM on November 15, 2005

I don't understand why this would be a good idea.
posted by interrobang at 6:05 PM on November 15, 2005

To add to what five fresh fish said, it would encourage a quasi-threaded format, which would be an even worse thing, because threaded conversations are not conversations at all, but are an amalgam of simultaneous conversations about different things.

Judicious quoting can add clarity to a comment but, if it is an "official" function, the inference begins that it is a required activity, which would further muddy the waters of some pretty murky threads.
posted by dg at 6:36 PM on November 15, 2005

mathowie writes "Anyone good at JavaScript and care to take a crack at it? I suspect it's probably easy to do in IE and Firefox (sorry Safari). Just highlight text on a page, "

It's not quite that easy, because the quoted text may contain html markup or single or double quotes. And, the quoter may copy a text fragment within html markup. For example, the user may want to quote one sentence within an entire bolded paragraph. In that case, Metafilthy must render the quoted text in bold, even though the bold markup isn't copied.

Metafilthy copies all the quoted markup (including url links, image links, boldface, italics, fonts, whatever), and any surrounding markup. Because Metafilthy italicizes the whole quote, following the AP Style Manual requires that any italicized portion of the original be un-italicized.

So Metafilthy then does a postorder traversal of the html document tree containing the fragment to be quoted, to make portions within italicized markup un-italicized, and vice versa. It's not sufficient to simply change any occurrence of "<i>" to "</i>", as this can result in un-nested markup: consider the source text "Normal <b>bolded <i>italicized bolded</i></b>"; the simple transform would result in the illegal html sequence "<I>Normal <b>bolded </i>italicized<i></b></i>".

Since Metafilthy also puts the quoted text in quotation marks (single or double depending on user preference), any quotation marks within the quoted text have to be changed from single to double or vice versa, to conform to the AP Style Manual. This in turn requires a simple heuristic be applied to distinguish embedded single quotes from apostrophes.

Finally, Metafilthy must determine the quote's author and the anchor tag of the original text, and link back to that text; this is further complicated because the structure of Metafilter "blue" pages is different from that of MetaTalk or AskMefi pages, requiring a separate algorithm for finding the author and back-link.

The total Metafilthy source code exceeds 1000 lines of JavaScript (although part of that is the code that tracks the user's last read comment in each thread, and any deleted comments, and part of it the code that recognizes Metafilter pages that allow comments, and then displays the Metaafilthy icon in the status bar).
posted by orthogonality at 6:42 PM on November 15, 2005

Oh, and the postorder traversal isn't that simple, because adjacent nodes with the same italicization status are coalesced into one surrounding italicization node. (In theory, this could be done by calling normalize() on the generated html, but for backward compatibility reasons it's managed explicitly).

As far as presentational matters -- some people don't like seeing quoted text, some prefer to see them less obtrusively than Metafilthy provides, some don't like to see the back-link, some wanted to use the html quote tag rather than actual quotatin marks, etc. -- when I was first developing Metafilhy, I emailed Matt to discuss adding a "span" tag around the quote, so that readers could alter the display of the quoted text in a user css file., or Matt could alter it with site-wide default. (Metafilter removes "span" tags in comments, so I couldn't add this without Matt's cooperation.) Matt never replied to my email, so I was unable to add this feature.
posted by orthogonality at 6:54 PM on November 15, 2005

"spectacular live preview applet" != "couple lines of javascript"

not that it's not cool and all, just saying.

anyway here's a thing I mostly stole from quirksmode

none of the possible methods give a fuck about html formatting and it'll just add plain text as it should. it won't credit the op unless you quote the byline too :]

function quote()
{
   // call me with an onmousedown event or I won't work XD
   var quotetext = ';
   if (window.getSelection)
   {
      quotetext = window.getSelection();
   }
   else if (document.getSelection)
   {
      quotetext = document.getSelection();
   }
   else if (document.selection)
   {
      quotetext = document.selection.createRange().text;
   }
   if (quotetext != ')
   {
      document.mefi.comment.value = document.mefi.comment.value + "<em>" + quotetext + "</em>";
   }
}

posted by moift at 7:12 PM on November 15, 2005

both the things with single quotes should be two single quotes together.
posted by moift at 7:15 PM on November 15, 2005

also change the last line to document.mefi.comment.value += "<em>" + quotetext + "</em>"; for 30 or 40 percent less ugly and dumb.
posted by moift at 7:19 PM on November 15, 2005

FFF: quoting provides necessary continuity in an unthreaded format, doesn't it?

And I have to disagree with you that it's better to offer your interpretation of what someone said than a verbatim quotation. Endless battles of "that's not what I said" or "that's not how I meant it" or "why do you always have to be such an asshole, scarabic?"

Trust me on this one.
posted by scarabic at 7:20 PM on November 15, 2005

Scarabic: a lot of miscommunication on MeFi is because people pullquote as a replacement of explicitly stating their interpretation, rather than as an addition to their paraphrase. I see it all the time, especially when the relentlessly literal folk get into any sort of conversation.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:16 PM on November 15, 2005

ortho makes my jaw drop.
Smart bastard.
posted by NinjaPirate at 1:16 AM on November 16, 2005

While it would be cool if MeFi implemented a quote feature like that, my vote is for Metafilthy, because it is very good, and it already exists.

five fresh fish : "a lot of miscommunication on MeFi is because people pullquote as a replacement of explicitly stating their interpretation, rather than as an addition to their paraphrase."

True, but then we've got this situation:

1) Pull quote only, which the responder seems to be misinterpreting = Arguments ensue
2) Pull quote, followed by interpretation by responder ("When you say this, what I hear you say is ...") = Communication ensues, but it's really verbose, and sounds like a counselling session, and complaints about longwindedness ensue
3) Interpretation only = Arguments ensue

So, yeah, pullquoting results in arguments, but there isn't an alternative that doesn't result in either different arguments or complaints.

Note, however, that I pullquoted you here just fine. I use MetaFilthy all the damn time, and while people have been annoyed at me for a number of things, using Metafilthy, or excessive brevity due to omitting a reinterpretation of what they say in addition to quoting them, are not among them.
posted by bugbread at 2:12 AM on November 16, 2005

While it would be cool if MeFi implemented a quote feature like that, my vote is for Metafilthy, because it is very good, and it already exists.

Well, not everyone uses Firefox. In fact, some of us who do not use Firefox have tried Firefox and still decided that we prefer another browser.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 6:42 AM on November 16, 2005

Metafilter: I think I am far more correct

I think easier quoting would cause a huge change in Metafilter, and I vote for the status quo. If it becomes the default behaviour to quote something and reply to that, I think this is very different from adding a comment into a general discussion. It will change things.
posted by nowonmai at 7:12 AM on November 16, 2005

DevilsAdvocate : "Well, not everyone uses Firefox."

Good point. Sorry, I had a little mental blankout there.
posted by bugbread at 7:28 AM on November 16, 2005

Not a long time Mefite, but I've been around my share of forums. Like fire&wings, I've always wondered about the lack of a built in quote feature. I'm completely satisfied with it being available in a GM script or extension though. I don't see how it would really be destructive, to me it is simply a tool to maintain cohesion in your thoughts and their direction.

I find it much more disconcerting when a single user is responding to multiple individuals without using an automated system and simply copying pertinent text in italics and then authoring their replies. It reads so incorrectly, and if you actually want to get context from the original comment you have to do some backflips in the search dialogue before you figure out what they (not to mention who they are) were going on about in the first place.
posted by prostyle at 8:53 AM on November 16, 2005

I think MetaFilthy is great. I use it all the time, I like when other people use it. I like that it retains a link to the previous text. Thanks, once again, orthogonality, for writing it.
posted by OmieWise at 1:31 PM on November 16, 2005