Forum software deleting way too much quoted text

Yikes!

The forum software has started deleting a whole bunch of quoted text, including in posts from a long time ago.

This is making many of the threads impossible to follow now, and greatly reduces the value of this forum as a knowledgebase.

This is a very active, very friendly, very chatty forum. Which means you get a lot of jokes and tangential responses. If you delete the quotes that people intentionally included in their post, you might have to go up 15 or 20 posts to try to figure out what the person is responding to. If you even can.

I’m guessing this might be some default on some new version and the mods don’t even realize that it’s happening, but it’s not a good thing.

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Ack… I wondered what that Edit indicator from “system” was about … in my activity log!

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I noticed this the other day and thought it was a glitch.

My guess, an attempt at saving storage OR an upgrade was done and some new default setting got missed.

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What is particular worrying is if someone is just reading down the thread the removal of the quoted text can make it look like a post is a response to the post just above it when it isn’t. :scream:

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I think this is a behavior change in discourse and have noticed it in my own posts. I believe that if you have quoted the previously reply in the thread it removes the quotes.

Here’s a thread discussing this on the discourse forums. We’ll discuss if we want to change this default: https://meta.discourse.org/t/system-edit-automatically-removed-quote-of-whole-previous-post/104122

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It’s not just removing a quote of the previous reply. It might be a quote of a post from 20 posts up in the thread.

Ah, I think you are right. I don’t care for this behavior and will advocate to change it.

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What’s particularly disturbing is the fact that it’s going back and doing this to posts which are literally months old. Yes, you get the little pencil notification that it’s being done, but I doubt if most people will remember what quote was removed. Or go to the effort to fix it in some way.

If it was only brand new posts, at least you would see it happen at the time that you made the post. But this is destroying the continuity of a number of otherwise valuable archived conversations, including FAQ threads. :disappointed_relieved:

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Should be fixed now :wink:

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Awesome! :heart_eyes:

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