Suggestion?

[Seffbasilisk]

I'm not certain where to put this exactly, as I don't see a suggestion box nailed up anywhere but, here goes:

Would it be possible to set up a system where one gets a notification when one is quoted? Many times I find myself scrolling through old threads I posted in but once, topic already resolved, just on the off-chance someone spoke directly as to what I said.

If there was a notification associated with quoting, it'd save a lot of hassle.

Just a thought.

Thanks.

[Haruki-kun]

While it's always nice to know someone read and considered your post (gives you a warm fuzzy feeling doesn't it? :smalltongue:), I don't think something like that is worth setting up a notification system for...

[Seffbasilisk]

I like knowing when people are quoting me. If they're misquoting, if they're misinterpreting, if there's some slight I made I was unaware of, if I've said something incorrect....

[Kobold-Bard]

Quote notification is a good system because it means you don't have to subscribe to threads you're not especially interested in just to see if someone replied to your post, you just get told when someone has.

However I can't imagine it's upcoming; I know nothing about making & maintaining a website, but it sounds like a lot of effort and not something that will improve the lives of the community as a whole (unlike the multi-quote which is epic beyond belief).

[Seffbasilisk]

Multi-quote's not that hard. You 'open in another tab' or what have you with the quote button, then copy that, and add it in to your final post.

Code-wise, it shouldn't be too hard to accommodate my request. Maybe a check-box in the User CP, that when checked, adds...two or three lines of code to the 'quote' button's readout.

[Kobold-Bard]

Multi-quote's not that hard. You 'open in another tab' or what have you with the quote button, then copy that, and add it in to your final post.

Code-wise, it shouldn't be too hard to accommodate my request. Maybe a check-box in the User CP, that when checked, adds...two or three lines of code to the 'quote' button's readout.

I know, but multi-quote is just so darned convenient (especially when I was stuck using my phone for months rather than a computer).

[happyturtle]

Code-wise, it shouldn't be too hard to accommodate my request. Maybe a check-box in the User CP, that when checked, adds...two or three lines of code to the 'quote' button's readout.

I'm not a programmer, but this sounds incredibly difficult to me, compared to just having the user subscribe to any threads that they think are important enough to post in.

[Douglas]

I'm not a programmer, but this sounds incredibly difficult to me, compared to just having the user subscribe to any threads that they think are important enough to post in.
I am a programmer (professional, even; my job title is Software Engineer), and while implementing the suggested feature would not be trivial I don't think it would be very difficult either. If I had full access to this site's code, I would be surprised if implementing this would take me more than a few days at most, and I might be able to do it in one day. Regardless, I don't think there would be much benefit from it.

[Rawhide]

There are numerous reasons why this is not going to happen and many of them have not been thought of or mentioned by anyone in this thread thus far.

Putting aside for a moment that writing a system like this would be far from trivial, there is currently no way for the system to determine that you have been quoted without searching the entire database of posts for "[QUOTE=Your Name;000000]" (with 000000 being a unique post number of variable length).

Now, even if a system was put in place to somewhat streamline the process (another non-trivial undertaking), implementing a check for new quotes every single time a page loads will harm system performance.

Then there's integration testing and security issues, ongoing testing and maintenance, as well as potential conflicts with features not yet implemented.

There's the cost to benefit analysis, which has briefly been touched upon.

Then there's... I think I've made my point. I don't want to slam your suggestion. But wish to explain, honestly, why it is unlikely to happen and why "it shouldn't be too hard to accommodate my request" is far from correct, in this and many other instances.

[Douglas]

Putting aside for a moment that writing a system like this would be far from trivial, there is currently no way for the system to determine that you have been quoted without searching the entire database of posts for "[QUOTE=Your Name;000000]" (with 000000 being a unique post number of variable length).

Now, even if a system was put in place to somewhat streamline the process (another non-trivial undertaking), implementing a check for new quotes every single time a page loads will harm system performance.
That strikes me as a rather bizarre way to implement it. Put the check in the post submission process, scan only the new post for quotes, and send a notification to each quoted person who wants to receive such notices. Making a new post already does some pretty significant processing work, such as checking if the new post is a duplicate of a recent post, so I think this would be a relatively small extra task for the server. If you're feeling ambitious, add a notified-but-not-viewed quotes list (cached in a new table in the database, of course) to be shown in the User CP along with subscribed threads, though that would probably require considerably more work both to implement properly and for the server to execute.

It's still a low benefit suggestion with a non-trivial implementation cost, but I don't think it's as bad as you presented.

[Rawhide]

That strikes me as a rather bizarre way to implement it. Put the check in the post submission process, scan only the new post for quotes, and send a notification to each quoted person who wants to receive such notices. Making a new post already does some pretty significant processing work, such as checking if the new post is a duplicate of a recent post, so I think this would be a relatively small extra task for the server. If you're feeling ambitious, add a notified-but-not-viewed quotes list (cached in a new table in the database, of course) to be shown in the User CP along with subscribed threads, though that would probably require considerably more work both to implement properly and for the server to execute.

It's still a low benefit suggestion with a non-trivial implementation cost, but I don't think it's as bad as you presented.

I mentioned this in my previous post when I said "Now, even if a system was put in place to somewhat streamline the process (another non-trivial undertaking)". The point in that explanation of how the data is stored was that there is currently no way to implement it.

This scan will need to be performed on every new post and on every edit, including to remove links to quotes that have been removed in subsequent edits. This new table will still need to be queried on every page load to determine if there have been any new quotes relating to your username and could easily get out of sync with the real database.

Finally, every additional query, every additional database change, regardless of how significant per individual request, can have a much larger impact on system performance than you might initially realise.

[zenanarchist]

So what Rawhide is saying is:

No, so long and thanks for all the fish.

[Haruki-kun]

So what Rawhide is saying is:

No, so long and thanks for all the fish.

Pretty much that.

[Seffbasilisk]

Even better than that, because the reasoning was explained.

Thank you.