Comments submitted to community posts
In the community, when a post is made, there can often be numerous replies or comments by people who see the specific question or comment.
It is not uncommon for me to see a string of responses to a POST - and then see a comment - that was NOT the original post - but was rather a comment/reply from another user. Sometimes I will want to provide clarification or feedback to that specific responder - with comments that apply to that specific person who replied. - and maybe are not meant as an answer to the original question.
It seems to me that in the old community - when we did A REPLY - to a comment in a large string of responses - it was clear how our response was stored - as to WHICH exact message in the entire thread we were replying to - (if it was not the original post)
In the new community - it seems that even if we are (attempting to ) replying to a specific response (and not the original post) - -that the way our post is stored - does not make that clear.
I do realize that we can respond privately to that person directly - or we can word our comments specifically so that we specifically state what person in the thread we are replying to or focusing on.
BUT I do wish in a long thread - that we could reply either to the original poster - OR to a person who responded - and have that selection - clearly indicated by how our response was displayed. (which is how i thought the OLD community worked)
its not uncommon for me to post something where I am trying to clarify or correct something another responder posted - and it ends up being received by the poster - who think my comments apply to then - instead of the other person who responded.
What do the rest of you think????
I suggest allowing to REPLY to a specific post within a thread and that replies/posts be dispalyed to indicate this clearly.
Comments
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I think it is much better to use a "Quote" function , or to actually quote the words and person's name yourself.
This is to retain all the information in a chronological order, which in my view is much easier to follow if you are reading through.
I might say that when I last tried to use the Quote function, (some time ago) it would would only copy the ENTIRE PREVIOUS POST, which in my view is useless if you just want to quote a selected few sentences. I therefore did not use the Quote function, but instead copied the wording I wished to refer to.
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@MaureenE123, I have discovered that you can quote a snippet of a post (or anything else) by preceding it with a greater-than sign (>) at the beginning of a line. (Note that the "order of operations" matters: you can't paste first and then add the character; that just makes it disappear.) And I'm just now discovering that typing a greater-than sign in the middle of text can result in Unintended Bad Things.
Gah, I hate it when computers decide that they're Smarter Than Thou....
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Testing.
(>)I have discovered that you can quote a snippet of a post (or anything else) by preceding it with a greater-than sign
@Julia Szent-Györgyi Unfortunately this didn't seem to work. Tried it with and without the ( ) signs.
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Huh.
Tried it with and without the ( ) signs.
The parentheses are definitely not meant to be included. I think maybe the trick is to follow the greater-than with a space? Testing:
Yikes. I typed ">Testing" (minus the quote marks) and then a space, and the whole thing disappeared, but the paragraph got indented with that gray stripe at the left.
Getting out of the quote mode pointed out another way to achieve quote-indented text: click somewhere in the paragraph you want to format as a quote (so that your cursor is blinking in it), and then click the paragraph mark (backward P-like thing) that shows up at the left. This pops up four choices: H2 (heading?), bulleted list, quote, and paragraph (plain). Here, let me test them:
Heading
- Bulleted
Quote
Paragraph
Huh. All but the paragraph mode have further choices: four different levels of headings, bulleted or numbered list, and quote, code block, or spoiler. More testing:
Heading 4
- Numbered list item 1
- List item 2 (indented one level)
- List item 3
Apparently, code blocks are parsed as code, so weird stuff happens as you type. And they're not a fixed-width font. They've totally missed the point of "code block". So much for using them for ASCII charts.
There's not much point to spoilers on this forum, but the capability is here.
Of course, the indented-quote style is totally different from the "embedded entire previous post" style, and you have to manually add the attribution, but it seems much more useful to me.
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test
I have discovered that you can quote a snippet of a post (or anything else) by preceding it with a greater-than sign
Thanks @Julia Szent-Györgyi The space after the symbol is what makes it work.
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Upvoting. I also want threaded comments. Quoting is not sufficient.
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Re: threaded comments. As I pointed out on a different copy of this question (somewhere in this mess of fragmented forums), there are disadvantages as well as advantages to a structured conversation. The main disadvantage is the way new responses get scattered all over creation, rather than being added chronologically at the end. This can make it infuriatingly difficult to follow and participate in an ongoing discussion.
As I also pointed out on that other thread, there is an easy workaround for an unthreaded/unstructured presentation, namely, quoting. I have yet to encounter an effective solution to the "what'd I miss?" problem.
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Usually threading is a reader option. The reader can decide to see a threaded view, or most recent on top, or oldest on top. There are other permutations, including sorted by most liked or most responses.
Reddit has a rich menu of such options.
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I agree - there should flexibility as to how the reader displays - that the user can then control.
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I'm not opposed to multiple sorting options, but optional threading has its own disadvantages: people will assume that whatever they see is what everyone else sees, greatly increasing the occurrence of no-context-provided responses.
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Responses with no context are the norm now. It seems to me threading could only improve the situation.
The threading would need to be well implemented; that makes a huge difference.
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