Actually they are no more complex than before, the difference being that we had easy to use buttons with the old forum. Now that we know that this forum supports markdown already, I suspect that it will be relatively straightforward to add similar buttons here.
Hwyl
Stu
Gary: One advantage to the quote on here is that on the old forum you got all the quote and had to delete what you didn’t want. On here you select what you do want.
And here you have to add the person’s name and remember to add another “arrowy thing” before the next line if they left a blank line in between parts of their post!
Much easier to erase than add–imho! 
One of the problems with erasing being easier than adding was that plenty of people didn’t erase, and we would see massive overquoting - people developing the habit of quoting everything in the post they were responding too, which ended up in bloat.
Stu’s right that it will be easy to add buttons here in due course - but it’s likely to remain very stripped down, and to have a different approach to quoting.
@Rambling John - no, sorry, we can’t just ‘copy’ bits of the old forum - everything in here has to be built from ground up. And no, sorry, it won’t do complicated ‘import text from another system and keep the formatting’, any more than the old forum did - but you can insert images with this:
I think Aran means:
If I’m right, an old friend should appear here: 
… also, the absence of a preview is disconcerting: but the fact that you can edit your own posts (by clicking the gear wheel at top right) for an hour after you have posted them does give you some of the same ability to correct mistakes.
(You just have to not mind making those mistakes in public … 
)
Yeah, I have four years’ worth of bad habits to give up
Aran: One of the problems with erasing being easier than adding was that plenty of people didn’t erase, and we would see massive overquoting - people developing the habit of quoting everything in the post they were responding too, which ended up in bloat.
Was this really a problem? Better to make things simple and encourage new users to use the forum than use some complex formula to quote/italics etc. Better to overquote than to not quote at all.
It’s starting to look like we’ve moved from an automatic system to a manual one.
I think Vaughan has a great point here, I agree that over quoting was a pain but I really can’t be bothered to learn how to do in manual what the old forum did with the click of a button … Quoting, underline, bold, italics, smilies, colours, sizes, etc, etc.
One of favourite lines … I don’t have a solution but I see the problem.
- Kinetic - Yeah, it’s Markdown, but much as I’d love to take the credit, that was actually Jo’s doing - I only discovered the fact myself by reading the code.
I’ve been meaning to look into whether it supported images, but never got round to it, so thanks for finding that out Simon/Owain!
Does Markdown include smilies?
Nope
Good spot, Mark, diolch! :seren:
@Vaughan/Geraint - yes, overquoting was a problem. I’ve seen threads (here and on other forums) that became virtually unreadable because every new post overquoted. Better not to quote at all than to overquote. How difficult is it to type @Vaughan? Or @Aran: Was overquoting really a problem?
Ask yourselves how much you really need the bells and whistles. The content is what matters, and there’s plenty of research that shows the more you take focus away from the content (COLOURS! SIZES! LOTS OF DIFFERENT FONTS!) the longer it takes people to read.
The simpler the forum is, the less there is to learn - the less there is to learn, the easier new users will find it.
YAY - the Preview button is back, and it works brilliantly! Diolch yn fawr Ifan! ![Gwych!] (http://www.saysomethingin.com/welsh/images/smilies/ssiwdawnsiodragon.gif)
Aran - @Vaughan/Geraint - yes, overquoting was a problem. I’ve seen threads (here and on other forums) that became virtually unreadable because every new post overquoted. Better not to quote at all than to overquote. How difficult is it to type @Vaughan? Or @Aran: Was overquoting really a problem?
In my view? Hard, especially when someone is asking about a language point and you want to answer precisely and concisely, or when there’s a sophisticated discussion happening, or a hot topic where someone wants to respond to a post three or four ago, or a place where the best way to respect someone’s account of his or her experiences is not to recharacterize it in your own words before responding. You use quoting a lot, I use it a lot, and I’ve always been impressed at the ratio of well-used quoting to overquoting on SSIW.
Aran, I agree with most of what you say but I fear that a lot of humour, warmth and friendliness would be lost by losing some of the functionality. I know that they will come so I’m not asking for them NOW but I’m just making a point. I think this forum is the greatest place on the web, I really do, and a lot of this comes from humour and sarcasm with becomes a little more difficult with plain script. I am very patient and will wait for them features to appear over time, I hope everyone else will too. 
As we sort of already knew on this point, Diane, it looks as though we’re going to need to agree to disagree, doesn’t it?! And to see how things pan out, and whether or not we can find any (more or less) objective way of measuring what sort of impact not having ‘easy’ quoting on tap makes (while we don’t have it). But thank you for providing that example of overquoting! - I’m presuming that the ‘In my view? Hard’ was replying specifically to the ‘How difficult is it to type @Vaughan?’ comment - so to understand it I had to re-read the whole paragraph. Quoting encourages that kind of imprecision, whereas ‘In my view, typing @Vaughan is hard’ would have made it immediately clearer what you were saying. If that is what you were saying?
Geraint, I know you’re coming at this from genuine concern, and I appreciate that… Look at all your stuff on Facebook, though - how much do you use font/colour/etc there? Sarcasm is always very tricky online, and only really works when people know each other well enough - humour often needs a wink or a smile, and those are here already, albeit in text form. But I honestly don’t believe that this community became what it is because of fonts and coloured text…
In fact, and on a bit of a tangent, I’d say that politeness and friendliness have been much more important to building the character of the forum than humour and sarcasm - the humour and sarcasm only become possible, really, once the bedrock of polite, friendly respect for other posters is in place…
I quoted what I quoted bc I was responding to both points you made: whether overquoting is a problem, and whether retyping what someone writes is hard. Not an accident.
Well, it managed to confuse me (mildly and temporarily!), because the ‘In my view? Hard’ only responded to one of them. It’s exactly the process that can lead to problems - ‘oh, I’ll just quote the whole thing, because I’m responding to the whole thing’. Look at your post with the quote reduced to ‘How difficult is it to type @Vaughan?’ - it wouldn’t have any loss of meaning.
There are some people on the old forum that seemed to use the “quote” button as a “reply” button - that was definitely over-quoting. But the best quoting feature, that I didn’t even realize until after a long time, was that you could start a reply, then scroll down to look at the posts before yours (below the reply window), highlight what you wanted to quote and just hit the button “quote” and it appeared in your (already started) reply - and only what you wanted was there.
I would like to see something - maybe a small floating window at the right? - where we could start a reply (with the window coming along), scroll up to the post we want to quote, highlight what we want and press a button in that window to make the quote appear in our post. But perhaps I’m dreaming…
That’s really interesting, Sionned - I never knew that was possible!
Throwing out these kinds of suggestions is always a really, really good thing, because we can now add/adapt stuff whenever we want (hours in Ifan’s days allowing!) - and there certainly isn’t a ‘rule’ that quoting is no longer allowed (or the markdown wouldn’t be there)…
So Owain found a way to embed an image; is there a way to embed a video or direct link to it as before?
