Re: Reply Window

Posted by GregChapman on Jul 05, 2019; 2:36pm
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Reply-Window-tp7603854p7603856.html

Hi Gary,

Gary Lewis wrote

On Nabble if you hit Reply you get an edit window and you can see only the post to which you are replying.  But frequently we want to reply to several posts, and in order to do that we have to open at least another tab to see what the others say, if not several tabs if we are quoting the other posts and want to copy the quote text.

Is there a setting or a way to change Nabble such that a reply allows you to still see the other posts?

There certainly is no setting/option that allows you to see all the posts prior to the one you are replying to below the edit box on the reply screen. I guess you'd need to code that in NAML - and that's beyond me!

Read no further unless you fancy a random selection of personal thoughts related to the issue.

I guess I suffer from the same rule based (and in my case Asperger's influenced) approach to things as the designers of Nabble, but I'd say that if you put replies to a number of posts in a single reply then you completely screw up post threading and, for me, that's an important and useful tool when you have a complex topic that begins to diverge.

With threaded thinking in mind the "correct" approach is to reply once and then go to all the posts to which your post refers and put a link there to where you have replied to them. Only doing things like that - or something similar - will allow those following a particular branch of the topic to be returned easily to the main thread.

Having offered that strict rule-based thought, I do accept that I have been known to reference a number of earlier posts in a topic in a single post, but I have always found it far easier to open those earlier posts in other tabs (with a wheel-click on their subject line) so I can switch between them quickly. I find that far more efficient than having to scroll up and down a list of old posts as I am sometimes permitted to do so in other software.

I guess the need for the feature depends very much on the individual forum, volume of traffic and typical length of posts and whether you are familiar with CTRL-TAB and CTRL-SHIFT-TAB as a way of switching backwards and forwards between tabs in a brower (or fields in a dialogue).