1. On a computer (not on a mobile device), you can drag your cursor over the text in a post on a thread to select it. When you let go of the mouse, a small “Quote” button will popup next to the selection. Click that and a new post will be started, with the quote inserted, including an attribution. It’s new and not very thoroughly tested yet, so if you have problems please reply.
2. The User-to-user Messaging function has been made substantially more reliable, so if you’ve tried it and not had much luck in the past please do give it another chance.
3. You can add recipients to a User-to-user message by typing in their names in the form. In fact, you always could, but now you’ll get a suggested auto-complete after you’ve typed the first three letters, which is handy for sending to people with long or hard to spell nicknames.
4. Not new, but not ovious or often used, remember you can put another user’s name in a post with a @mention – this will email them to them they’ve been mentioned in a post. So if someone wrote @david in a post I’d get notified. Plus the name will become a clickable link to that person’s profile.
Are there any other features you long for? If so, let me know. No promises, but all will be considered.
Enjoy.
It may be worth mentioning that in a @mention, any spaces contained in a user name should be replaced with underscores (or at least that’s what I worked out empirically).
David wrote:
1. On a computer (not on a mobile device), you can drag your cursor over the text in a post on a thread to select it. When you let go of the mouse, a small “Quote” button will popup next to the selection. Click that and a new post will be started, with the quote inserted, including an attribution. It’s new and not very thoroughly tested yet, so if you have problems please reply.
That’s a great feature (and I’m trying it as I type…). Any chance the pop-up button can be made more distinguishable from the background? It now has the same color as the (alternating) dark grey post boxes. I think either changing the color or adding a border or both would be a simple but effective improvement.
David wrote:
When you let go of the mouse, a small “Quote” button will popup next to the selection.
Very nice!
Thanks for the feedback.
Ultranomad wrote:
any spaces contained in a user name should be replaced with underscores
That was true, but actually I am about to remove spaces from user names. With them present it breaks various things. Sorry “Airborne Again”, you’ll henceforth be “Airborne_Again”!
Patrick wrote:
Any chance the pop-up button can be made more distinguishable from the background?
Done.
Also done is Peter’s request to make the button disappear – it now will disappear if you scroll, with a little hysteresis so that it doesn’t disappear just because you scrolled accidentally.
David wrote:
Done.Also done is Peter’s request to make the button disappear – it now will disappear if you scroll, with a little hysteresis so that it doesn’t disappear just because you scrolled accidentally.
Great! I like both changes – now it’s a pretty sleek feature and light years ahead of other forums! 
Can I be the voice of dissent?
I often highlight text in order to look it up in a dictionary from a browser menu – the quote button gets in the way of that.
If it’s just me, and the quote button is enabled by a script, I can disable the script (please let me know which one @David).
@Finners, hmmmm. Good point! That’s why we’re testing this stuff out amongst the EuroGA audience.
I’ve just tried that – for me it was still possible to right click once I’d highlighted and then click for the definition. If we moved the quote button slightly higher so it didn’t obscure part of the text you’d highlighted would that make it easier?
Hi David.
If the quote button can be moved so that it is either above the upper-most quoted line or below the bottom most quoted line then that could work. I can think of reasons to put it in either a top or bottom location.
For my original request, I want it out of the way of the browser-click menu, but that could appear anywhere depending on whether the highlighted text is at the top, middle or bottom of the screen. Awkward. For anyone quoting a large block of text, a bottom location would probably be preferable, as they are likely to select text from left-to-right and top-to-bottom.
I’m glad I’m not designing user interfaces!
Finners, thanks. Two thoughts. I think ultimately this is best handled by making it optional, so users who find it interferes can switch it off. Secondly, if you do want to keep using it, there are a couple of workarounds, neither very elegant but both quote effective. The button appears where the mouse button is released – so if you’re careful you may be able to do your selection and let go of the mouse in a place where the button’s appearance doesn’t cause a problem. Also, if you scroll a little after making your selection and releasing the mouse button the popup button will disappear anyway, thus leaving your text ready for a right click context menu. Hope that helps!
