Somehow missed this.
I wasn’t calling it a flaw, just describing the behavior. Sometimes you just want to make a comment in a thread, without seeming to respond to a particular post. That’s useful, and the reply from a particular post is useful, they just behave differently (and correctly imo).
For me, this sw is better than the old, with the various options. It does make things more complicated, and a little tricky to follow if you don’t use it a lot.
indeed. now you see the power and impact of UX. it’s quite literally everything.
if you unpack this in the form of a user story, you easily see the challenges for a UX designer. you need to handle a myriad of posts being nested or not and to what extent and if it’s just one that’s easy, but 2+ it gets messy. so you have ot fight to keep it clean, but also make it easy to use. in my own company, it has taken me the better part of a year to fully appreciate this and i’m likely only 60% there. but once you see the world through this lens, the underlying issues really come down to “what are you optimizing for?” and that’s rarely clear at first, so iterative changes are required and likely never end. as far as products we use often, apple comes closest to nailing it, but think of how many small but fundamental things they’ve changed over the years from feedback and research.
and of course, their most famous UX story is “just avoid holding it in that way” - which applies almost perfectly to this thread.
a funny but illustrative example: Devs watching QA test the product - YouTube
I’m glad this has been cleared up.
-Al
I see what you mean, I think
Greg replied to Stan, who replied to Dennis - but because Stan didn’t quote Dennis, it doesn’t show as a nested bunch of quotes…of note, this was exactly the same on the old forum. Unless the person did ‘reply with quote’ no attribution at ALL was given, more searching had to be done - at least here, you can quickly research it, as you just have to follow the preview links, versus guesswork, since it does attribute the preview to the post being replied to.
The issue isn’t comparing the new sw to the old sw. It’s comparing how the new sw handles post-replies differently based on whether they are the very next post in the thread or not, and how that impacts ease of following the discussion. For other purposes, handling them differently makes some sense. In instances like these, though, it requires the user to follow extra steps to follow the conversation, which I find to be a negative (unintended?) consequence of the decision to treat the two types of post-replies differently.
Perhaps because quoting was easier, or seems to have been based on how many have trouble or don’t use it because they find it difficult, here, the problem appears worse now. But by all means, explain some more why it shouldn’t be frustrating. 
(That was meant as a good natured jab.)
Perhaps, indeed - there were two simple options: 1) reply and 2) reply with quote
The system ‘conveniently’ adding attributions with previews and uplinks has created a better feature set, but then subsequently created more confusion because now it’s essentially ‘too many’ options…
Exactly what I said previously and it makes sense to me that it would be this way.
If only I had seen it with some correct quoting and attribution!!
To be fair, it’s harder on a phone, because the quote bubble and especially the quote selection are very small and its tough to select text with old eyes and fat fingers.
My problem is I didn’t realize that little chat bubble was to quote the whole post. I was hitting the quote symbol " which doesn’t work well. I had also found the “select text” to quote option, but that seemed cumbersome.
Now that I know about the little chat bubble, I am super happy. I suspect there are tons of users who do not know about the chat bubble. Maybe we need to launch operation chat bubble to spread the word?
I agree. But if the programmers chose to, they could (I assume) still have it capture the attribution “behind the scenes” and just not display it in a “very next post” post-reply, so that if and when it is quoted later, users get all the info they want simply by expanding the post instead of having to expand the post, then click the up arrow, then scroll up one more post (and then click to come back to the bottom to resume reading the thread). That, to me, would be an improvement and it would be cool if they included that in a future update.
My 1st use of the chat bubble
I didn’t know about it either
I sometimes use the chat bubble, then delete extraneous stuff, if I can’t easily select just the text I want to quote with the floating Quote box.
this is the correct way to use it imo.
but you also need to know what to delete from the rest of the quoted text:
[quote="Troy_Stark, post:134, topic:297717, full:true"]
[quote="ToddFrench, post:130, topic:297717, full:true"]
Perhaps, indeed - there were two simple options: 1) reply and 2) reply with quote
The system 'conveniently' adding attributions with previews and uplinks has created a better feature set, but then subsequently created more confusion because now it's essentially 'too many' options...
[/quote]
My problem is I didn't realize that little chat bubble was to quote the whole post. I was hitting the quote symbol " which doesn't work well. I had also found the "select text" to quote option, but that seemed cumbersome.
Now that I know about the little chat bubble, I am super happy. I suspect there are tons of users who do not know about the chat bubble. Maybe we need to launch operation chat bubble to spread the word?
[/quote]
So you have to hit Reply first before you can see the chat bubble, correct? That’s the only place I can find it.
Since we are drilling down on all this, am I correct that:
(1) to see the post being replied to, you have to click on the curved arrow with the avatar in the upper right,
(2) that then takes you to the post which was being replied to,
(3) but then, you’re just back to that place on the thread, and you have to manually find your way back to where you had been before.
Is that correct? That is a little challenging in long threads. You come into the thread which has 42 posts since you last read. 13 posts into the unread ones, you see a comment that is a reply and you can’t tell what it’s referring to. So you click on the curved arrow / avatar thing and that pops you back somewhere earlier in the thread. Now you have to figure out where you had been before.
Is that right, or is there some easy way to do that?
I don’t say that to b*tch, but since we are getting granular here, I’m curious to know if there is a better way.
No. When you hit the curved arrow, it displays the referenced post right there, above the post you’re currently reading. Not until you hit the little up arrow (found in a quote of some earlier post) does it jump you to an earlier post. And even then, in that post you’ll see a down arrow that takes you back to where you came from.
Ah, thanks. I think I had gotten confused when I see the earlier post, and I’m not sure where I am at anymore.