Automatic edit when quoting whole posts

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Apologies if this has been asked before (I have searched, but no joy). I have noticed that the forum automatically edits quotes of whole posts in order to remove the quoting. This seems like a good idea, but it can be baffling when the whole post being quoted is just a short sentence. This is what happened to my post here. I was quoting the one immediately above.

I have been in other Discourse forum that doesn’t have this feature, so my question is: is this specific to the IF forum via some add-on? Or is it a default Discourse feature that happens to be disabled in the other forum? In some forums I know (non-Discourse I think) there’s also a rule to never quote the post just above, regardless of size. I’m asking just out of curiosity (and for future reference), as I did not see this documented in the User Guide, or else I managed to miss it.

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I also find it annoying, and wish there was a way to tell the forum “yes I really know what I’m doing”.

But I don’t know of one.

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I’m trying it here. I believe I’ve read the Discourse philosophy is if you’re replying as the next message there’s no point to basically repost the entire preceding message if your reply is next in sequence.

EDIT: Yep, Discourse first posted the entire message with Daniel’s entire message quoted then edited it out. So “working as intended”. As you can see above I can quote part of the preceding message but not all of it.

I should be able to fully quote a message that’s not in sequence though:

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I think you can just select (with the mouse) some part of a person’s post and click the button that pops up – I’ve done that on other forums and I’m fairly sure it works here too.

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You can, but (as you can see in my edit history) if your quote is just the entirety of the post above yours, the system will automatically edit your post to remove the quote.

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I just tried to fool the system by changing the opening tag to read “full:false.”
Let’s see if that worked.

EDIT: No, it did not. It originally showed the quote, then immediately reloaded with the quote expunged.

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So I have discovered this is a setting we can alter. The criteria to remove a fully quoted message:

So I can turn this off, however I sort of agree that there’s really no need to duplicate the entire preceding post in the next message for redundancy. Note that this only takes effect if the quote is the start of your post. If you’ve typed something before for context, it should leave it in.

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But sometimes it’s just one short sentence. And the quote can’t be reduced further.

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I’ve replied to your message. Your one short sentence is visible above and there really isn’t any problem with continuity or context since I’m replying directly to the last message and there’s nothing else in between that might confuse things.

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Ok, I understand your point of view. :slight_smile:

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And if you’re quoting a long post, you can quote it entirely if you do so by breaking it up into smaller quotes. Which is probably what you’d want to do most of the time anyway, so that you can reply to each section.

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Thanks, this actually answers my question. So it is a setting that can be toggled after all, which is what must have happened in the other forum.

I don’t really see a reason to change the default (as it is harmless and keeps things tidier), but it might be good to document it somewhere in the forum help as it can be a bit confusing if you don’t expect it.

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Maybe you could add a character before the “quote” tag, to stop it functioning properly, then edit the post to remove that character after submitting it… yes, that worked :slight_smile:

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Or just write a sentence of introduction first like “I have comments about what Bob said below…”

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That makes more sense. I like the setting as it is.