In Reply to and/or Reply Notifications broken



  • Continuing the discussion from How many of regulars here actually fit the "geek" stereotypes?:

    @Onyx said:

    What in the actual fuck?

    <img src='/uploads/default/3059/6e515207b024f84a.png'>

    • I get a notification @dhromed replied to my post
    • he actually just quoted @antiquarian
    • there is no link in his post indicating that he replied to me, yet the notification the cursor is pointing at takes me to his post (see <s>statusbar</s> floaty thiggy for confirmation)

    Link to actual image in case DC mangles it too much: http://i.imgur.com/YV15eMI.png


    Filed under: Just found 2 bugs in Kazam. Yay, Fucking hell, it broke BOTH, had to manually force it into being a link

    I think that the "In Reply" to still needs tweaking. Either that or the reply notifications. If you can get a notification that a someone replied to you, then there should be some indicator that the reply was to you.


  • Banned

    Can't explain it, the only thing I can think of is that it originally contained a reply to @onyx and was edited away in the grace period after posting. Perhaps @dhromed can clarify?

    If that's not it, very odd.



  • @abarker said:

    .

    This post is a reply to codinghorror with a single quote from the OP.


  • Banned

    No, does not show as a reply to me. I believe any quoting in the post overrides the explicit "reply" indicator.


  • BINNED

    @codinghorror said:

    No, does not show as a reply to me. I believe any quoting in the post overrides the explicit "reply" indicator.

    Did you still get the notification? That's what happened in my case. So I believe the repro is:

    • click reply to someone's post, not the topic reply.
    • quote someone else's post
    • this notifies the person whose post you clicked reply on, however it does not retain the "in reply to" link

    It should either keep the indicator, or not send the notification. You could argue for both cases IMHO, but this way it's just confusing.



  • Attempting here. Replying to post 4 by @codinghorror as shown in this screen cap:

    Quoting post 5 by @Onyx:

    @Onyx said:

    Did you still get the notification? That's what happened in my case. So I believe the repro is:

    • click reply to someone's post, not the topic reply.
    • quote someone else's post
    • this notifies the person whose post you clicked reply on, however it does not retain the "in reply to" link
    It should either keep the indicator, or not send the notification. You could argue for both cases IMHO, but this way it's just confusing.

  • BINNED

    I got the mention, but not the quote, I guess mention overrides it.

    Now we have to see if @codinghorror got the notification, but the in-reply-to thing is missing.


  • Banned

    No, there was no notification.


  • BINNED

    @abarker said:

    Attempting here.

    Ok, now replying to codinghorror without any mentions that might override the reply notification, like it did the quote notification in the previous post by abarker.

    If that doesn't work, then there must've been some other special case when it triggered for me.

    Edit: well... wtf?



  • I swear it said I replied to you last night. Something must be different on-post than on-load.


  • BINNED

    @ben_lubar said:

    I swear it said I replied to you last night. Something must be different on-post than on-load.

    Hey! You're right! My edit was due to my reply-to showed that it was to @codinghorror.

    I now re-entered the topic and it's gone.



  • I got the notification.


  • BINNED

    Reproing by replying to ben and quoting abarker:

    @abarker said:

    I got the notification.

    Edit 1: without refreshing

    Edit 2: after refresh



  • @ben_lubar said:

    Something must be different on-post than on-load.


  • BINNED

    Well, there we go. So it either doesn't get saved properly server-side, or it's a baking error. It works properly client-side at first for the person that replies, but fails on subsequent page loads.



  • It must get saved serverside if you saw it last night. Definitely something to do with how it decides whether to show the "in reply to" thing.


  • BINNED

    Not necessarily. It might save the notification properly but not the post itself. In any case, we're just guessing at this point.

    Paging @sam as well since we have a proper repro now.



  • That should probably check to see if at least one of the quotes in the post refers to the post that it is a reply to before bailing out.


  • Banned

    This is partly just a client side UI issue, we optimistically render the reply before attempting to post it to the server, then pull it back if it fails. The rendering here on the client makes assumptions that don't jibe with what the server decides, e.g. a reply with quotes to other people that don't match the person who is the original reply button target becomes a reply to those other people.

    Imo this kind of makes sense, if I press the reply button on Ben Lubar's post but then only quote Onyx, it is a de facto reply to Onyx (and whoever else I quote).

    Something to look at @eviltrout.



  • If possible, fix the "in reply to" not showing up and don't "fix" the clientside rendering.


  • BINNED

    @codinghorror said:

    Imo this kind of makes sense, if I press the reply button on Ben Lubar's post but then only quote Onyx, it is a de facto reply to Onyx (and whoever else I quote).

    I could argue differently. What if I want to respond to something you asked, but ben already answered it before, so I quote ben saying:

    @ben_lubar said:

    Go is the best language ever!

    And then I elaborate on that here.

    I could quote you, like I did here, but I mostly did that because ben just replied as I was typing this, and because I'm aware of the bug. But you could make the case that someone used to having the in-reply-to link available and using it would falsely assume that it will work, when it fact it doesn't. To that user, any post (not his necessarily) where in-reply-to is not shown would indicate that this is a general answer to the topic (using the + Reply) and not an answer to someone.

    Again, this is sort of an edge case, and you could argue it both ways. I do, however, find the behaviour that is at first presented on client-side as more logical and would keep the in-reply-to indicator. Makes it easier to follow the discussion if the context gets a bit fuzzy at any point.


  • Banned

    In-reply-to has never shown up, and is not supposed to show up, when you quote someone inside your post. The visual link is the actual quote you made in the post.

    The in-reply-to button at the upper right is intended for cases when you don't quote any content in your post. Like this one, because I did not quote your post anywhere in here, right?

    The specific case being discussed here is, what if I click reply on person A's post, but then quote person B and not person A? Should the indicator show up in that case, or is this even a reply at all to person A at that point? It is kind of indeterminate.



  • @codinghorror said:

    Some things

    Testing quote reply with the quote and the post being the same...

    Edit: Ok, so that's broken on the client.

    Point is, you can't remove the "in reply to" thing if the post it's replying to isn't in one of the quotes because that's just losing information.


  • Banned

    Possibly, but the server discards that info at this time too. Not sure if that's the way it always was, I need @eviltrout to have a look.



  • tl;dr: If I click the reply-to button on post A, I want to reply to post A, even if I quote post B. I should be able to get that effect without quoting post A.

    @codinghorror said:

    The specific case being discussed here is, what if I click reply on person A's post, but then quote person B and not person A? Should the indicator show up in that case, or is this even a reply at all to person A at that point? It is kind of indeterminate.

    You do have a point there, but the way that Discourse currently handles it takes responsibility away from the user. As it is, the reply button on each post means nothing if I include a quote in my post. You might as well have a reply button which just floats in one of the gutters and get rid of all the other reply buttons.

    @Onyx said:

    I could argue differently. What if I want to respond to something you asked, but ben already answered it before, so I quote ben saying:
    @ben_lubar said:
    Go is the best language ever!

    And then I elaborate on that here.

    I could quote you, like I did here, but I mostly did that because ben just replied as I was typing this, and because I'm aware of the bug. But you could make the case that someone used to having the in-reply-to link available and using it would falsely assume that it will work, when it fact it doesn't.

    @Onyx present a good case. One I was starting to think of before I even read his post. I think that the best way to address this would be to have Discourse assume that when a user clicks the reply button on a post, they mean to reply to that post, no matter what the content of the reply is. It shouldn't be Discourse's job to determine who the user meant to reply to, and I shouldn't have to insert quotes from multiple posts to to make sure everything gets tied together correctly.



  • Additional examples in the "Likes" thread here and here


  • Banned

    I am not against it per se, we just need some time to look at it. We might have even worked that way in the past.


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