Dlang forum: some feature requests

[biocyberman via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 8 April 2017 at 12:34:56 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:
> On Saturday, 8 April 2017 at 12:15:45 UTC, biocyberman wrote:

> This is planned in a future update, as part of Markdown support.
>

So it is coming. This is great.

>
> The forum software will already detect overquoting, and offer 
> to trim down quoted text automatically.
>
> Sometimes, more than one level of context is required, when the 
> parent's post provides no context, such as replies like "What 
> do you mean?" or "I don't think this is true".
>

Yes, quoting only "I don't think this is true" does not make 
sense. However, as the way the forum is doing now: 100% of the 
third posts - like the one I am posting now - prompt manual 
delete (i.e. user A post, user B reply, user A reply user B post, 
and here he faces overquoting filter, and have to manually delete 
quote text.) I would not use the force overquoting option. So the 
gain for avoiding 'sometimes' silly post does not weigh over the 
third post cases, which happens much more frequently. And after 
all, users does have interest to make there posts meaningful, so 
he/she will copy and quote the relevant parts.

> however, copying text from multiple posts for the purpose of 
> replying to several posts at once goes against the threaded 
> nature of the underlying medium (newsgroup/email messages),
>

Here it depends how the forum developers envision the core 
functionality. In my opinion, making a forum to fit 
newsgroup/email threads conventions will limit its online 
interaction features (i.e. text format, multimedia, user 
interaction, etc). Mailing list is one thing, forum is another 
thing; so making the current forum act as both will be difficult. 
If the interface of a normal forum software is too convoluted, 
the Quest and Answer interface like that of StackOverflow may be 
a good alternative.

>and the forum will warn against
> this if it detects such an attempt.
Again, it is user best interests to make the post convey what 
they want to say. A mechanistic enforcement requires much work to 
make sense to human users. Maybe someday a advanced AI forum 
engine can do a good job =)

>
> Thanks for the feedback.
That's my pleasure. I hope dlang.org is a lively showcase of what 
D can offer.