Changing Quotes

luvflyin

luvflyin

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
May 8, 2015
Messages
17,444
Location
Santa Barbara, CA
Display Name
Luvflyin
Home Airfield
KVUO
I just noticed when you reply to a post, you can change the Quote you replied to. As if that’s what that person had actually said. That don’t seem right.
 
luvflyin said:
It’s wrong. You shouldn’t be able to. It’s a lie.
Click to expand...

the problem is the difficulty in preventing someone from editing text... they can't edit your actual post (well, maybe the mods and/or admins can), but it isn't any different than using "It’s wrong. You shouldn’t be able to. It’s a lie." and mucking with it...
 
It took me by surprise , I don’t mind having my spelling corrected however changing what I said or meant isn’t cool.
 
I remember Captain Ron getting pretty irate when that would happen to him. He had enough people disagreeing with him on a lot of things. But then someone would stealth edit a quoted post of his and people would start hitting him for that.

I dunno - I guess as long as you make it obvious that you made and edit that might be OK. But I would be skeptical of what's inside a quote other than as a reminder of what the context is of the response.
 
Matthew said:
I remember Captain Ron getting pretty irate when that would happen to him. He had enough people disagreeing with him on a lot of things. But then someone would stealth edit a quoted post of his and people would start hitting him for that.

I dunno - I guess as long as you make it obvious that you made and edit that might be OK. But I would be skeptical of what's inside a quote other than as a reminder of what the context is of the response.
Click to expand...
Well, there is that ‘fixed that for you’ thing where you can make it obvious you’re just clownin’ around a little. As far as context goes, it can just take one word to change that.
 
Bob Noel said:
the problem is the difficulty in preventing someone from editing text... they can't edit your actual post (well, maybe the mods and/or admins can), but it isn't any different than using "It’s wrong. You shouldn’t be able to. It’s a lie." and mucking with it...
Click to expand...
Preventing changing someone else’s post should be able to be done by just programming to not allow it. Shouldn’t it? What say you IT dudes? I know there’s a lot of you here.
 
luvflyin said:
Preventing changing someone else’s post should be able to be done by just programming to not allow it. Shouldn’t it? What say you IT dudes? I know there’s a lot of you here.
Click to expand...
I’m not even sure there’s an option for it in the back end panel, but I could check.
 
RyanB said:
I’m gonna get to the bottom of this and fix this if I have to stay up all night doing it
Click to expand...
Oh, wait, that’s not what you said. Even though it says RyanB said. What you actually said was “I’m not even sure there’s an option for it in the back end panel, but I could check.” Anyway, what did you find out?
 
Daleandee said:
If you tap the "up arrow" next to the quote it will take you back to the original ...
Click to expand...
The arrow only appears if you select ‘reply.’ So someone just reading the thread won’t know that it was a lie unless they do that.
 
Last edited:
luvflyin said:
Oh, wait, that’s not what you said. Even though it says RyanB said. What you actually said was “I’m not even sure there’s an option for it in the back end panel, but I could check.” Anyway, what did you find out?
Click to expand...
I don’t see any options for it.
 
luvflyin said:
I just noticed when you reply to a post, you can change the Quote you replied to. I'm gonna do a lot of that.
Click to expand...

This is wrong at a lot of levels.
 
Yeah the forum software is lazy about quotes -- they're just added to your reply as a new sort of text, they don't exist as some sort of entity of their own that can be included while made read-only.

It could be done. It probably could be done rather straightforwardly -- but it's not done here, and I haven't seen it elsewhere either.
 
luvflyin said:
Preventing changing someone else’s post should be able to be done by just programming to not allow it. Shouldn’t it? What say you IT dudes? I know there’s a lot of you here.
Click to expand...

You aren't changing someone's post. The post is still there, and is very easily referenced. I do it every day. You are only changing the quotation. And no there is no way to change it with "programming" because the quote is part the post doing the quoting, not the quoted.
 
Last edited:
schmookeeg said:
It could be done. It probably could be done rather straightforwardly -- but it's not done here, and I haven't seen it elsewhere either.
Click to expand...
Not without completely changing the user experience. Among other things, it would destroy a point-counterpoint type of discussion. If the quote cannot be edited, then the only thing you could ever do is quote a post in it's entirety as one big blob. At that point, why bother with a quotation feature.

There would also be a performance penalty unless the programmer got clever about it.
 
Last edited:
luvflyin said:
I just noticed when you reply to a post, you can change the Quote you replied to. As if that’s what that person had actually said. That don’t seem right.
Click to expand...

0bc27d1a708946a2e561af27a6933998.jpg
 
You can quote anything... for instance I can quote myself

RyanShort1 said:
I can quote myself
Click to expand...

if you know BBCode and how to use it...

There is literally no way to prevent this. It's an honor system, and if you get misquoted, you can rightly respond and point out that the alleged quote is false.
 
It gets tricky when a post is quoted, then the original poster edits his post.

The original post is gone (modified by the original poster)... so the quoted post will the look wrong.

But if you look at the time stamp on the post with the quote and the time stamp on the post that is now edited, you would be able to figure out that the quoted post (quoted prior to the original poster editing his post) didn't change the post... maybe

One method to make sure a post isn't mis-quoted would be to digitally sign the post - and that leads down the path of needing keys, etc etc. Technically possible, but waaaaaay more work than it would be worth or at least probably waaaaaaaaaaaay more work than admins would want to bother with.
 
Bob Noel said:
It gets tricky when a post is quoted, then the original poster edits his post.

The original post is gone (modified by the original poster)... so the quoted post will the look wrong.
Click to expand...
One of the beauties of being able to use BB Code is to be able to specifically reply to one part of the post...
Bob Noel said:
But if you look at the time stamp on the post with the quote and the time stamp on the post that is now edited, you would be able to figure out that the quoted post (quoted prior to the original poster editing his post) didn't change the post... maybe

One method to make sure a post isn't mis-quoted would be to digitally sign the post - and that leads down the path of needing keys, etc etc. Technically possible, but waaaaaay more work than it would be worth or at least probably waaaaaaaaaaaay more work than admins would want to bother with.
Click to expand...
And to reply to another part as well. If you have a computer and know how to cut and paste, no level of digitally signing is going to keep someone from using copy and paste functions and BBcode to create a "quote" and there's literally no way to stop that, just like you can't stop me from standing on a street corner and coming up with some ridiculous mis-quote of Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln said:
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Click to expand...
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/misattributed-to-abraham-lincoln

At least in the forum format, it's relatively easy to go back and find the referenced post, where on a street corner, I might be able to fool a number of people about some dead politician's words and beliefs.
 
I end up editing quoted posts more often than I realized. There are a lot of times I'll quote a post, then edit out paragraph or sentence so whatever is left is the part that I'm responding to. Sometimes it make a lot more sense that way.
 
And I’ll just say, I’m surprised you just noticed this @luvflyin, it’s been that way since this board was created (17 years ago). Every forum that I’ve participated on is also this way.
 
It could be handled as a check before submitting a new post -- anything in bbcode quote tags needs to exist upstream in the thread verbatim. This would allow partial quotes to exist as long as they're unchanged from the original. This would also allow subsequent edits. If the original quote content changed, however, you would need to re-update the quote to submit a change to a follow-on post.

No performance ramification, just an extra few ms on submit.
 
:stirpot::stirpot:
dmspilot said:
First time? :D
Click to expand...
Yeah. I was putting an emoji at the end of my reply and it didn’t show up. So I did it again. That’s when I saw that two of the emoji’s were up in the quote I was replying to. Like this. Well, not really ‘in’ the quote. The cursor was up there for some reason. So I put the cursor in the text up there and found out I could change what that person said up there.
 
schmookeeg said:
It could be handled as a check before submitting a new post -- anything in bbcode quote tags needs to exist upstream in the thread verbatim. This would allow partial quotes to exist as long as they're unchanged from the original. This would also allow subsequent edits. If the original quote content changed, however, you would need to re-update the quote to submit a change to a follow-on post.

No performance ramification, just an extra few ms on submit.
Click to expand...
But… but… how would we correct spelling and grammatical errors, or point out that something doesn’t give you “piece of mind” unless it’s irritated with you?
 
RyanB said:
And I’ll just say, I’m surprised you just noticed this @luvflyin, you idiot, what’s wrong with you, it’s been that way since this board was created (17 years ago). Every forum that I’ve participated on is also this way.
Click to expand...
Well sheesh, ya don’t gotta get all personal about it. I’m reporting this to….oh, wait:goofy:

EDIT: Even though it says “RyanB said” he didn’t say all of it.
 
Last edited:
Matthew said:
I end up editing quoted posts more often than I realized. There are a lot of times I'll quote a post, then edit out paragraph or sentence so whatever is left is the part that I'm responding to. Sometimes it make a lot more sense that way.
Click to expand...
So you just change w
RyanShort1 said:
You can quote anything... for instance I can quote myself



if you know BBCode and how to use it...

There is literally no way to prevent this. It's an honor system, and if you get misquoted, you can rightly respond and point out that the alleged quote is false.
Click to expand...
I’m not a programmer. Only thing I’ve ever done is BASIC many years ago. But I find it hard to believe that the code writer guys at XenForo couldn’t do it.

EDIT: Sheesh, that got all mixed up with a reply that I had been preparing for another reply
 
Last edited:
Matthew said:
I end up editing quoted posts more often than I realized. There are a lot of times I'll quote a post, then edit out paragraph or sentence so whatever is left is the part that I'm responding to. Sometimes it make a lot more sense that way.
Click to expand...
I’ll do something like that if the other persons post was a real long one and it covered more than one topic. Like this. In my reply. You said above “…blah blah blah…”
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top