[Feature] Auto-merging Double Posts and Ninja-Reply notifications

[synkr0nized]

It's been a couple weeks since these were implemented, but I forgot to make an announcement.

Notification of New Posts Made While Replying

In Simple Machines Forums, a warning is displayed at the top along with the new reply/replies made since you had started to make your own reply.

This merely shows the warning and suggests that you scroll down to the topic review to see the new posts -- basically, the coder wrote the part that checks the timestamp for when a user started to reply and compares that to the timestamps for replies made to a thread when the user attempts to post that reply. The coder did not continue through and code the plugin to note any new reply/replies explicitly. It just triggers a force-preview to show a warning message and allow the default forum scripts to re-pull the Thread Review data to catch the new post(s).

It will only show the warning with a quick reply and cannot show the new posts. Basically the way Quick Reply works there appears to be no way to both check for new posts and to refresh the page to show the new posts. The message here suggests going to the normal reply screen to see what's been added.

Double-Post Auto-Merging

I have tested this, and it works with regular replies and quick replies. It also is compatible with the above, it seems, as I was able to see warnings about auto-merged new posts.

What it does is simple -- if the person posting a reply is also the last person to have posted in a thread, the forum will not add a new reply but rather append the reply into the previous post. It adds a separator with timestamp information, showing when the original post was made and when the new one was made and edited into the post.

Additionally, and this is pretty rad, it updates the overall merged post to use the timestamp of the last post merged into it. This means that the thread will still get bumped the same as if a new post was made.

---------- Post added at 12:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:58 AM ----------

And here I've used the auto-merge feature on purpose so you can see what it looks like.

Also, note that auto-merged posts do not add to your post count. I suspect there are a few people who'd have far less posts recorded for their account if we had this years back.


Also, though this probably only affects me, any subject used in a post will be retained -- subject lines entered for a post that gets auto-merged are dropped.

[Menarker]

Question! For the double-posting feature, does the merged posts still have a character limit? Or is there an function to disable this merging capability if it would be more convenient for the writer?

For example, in the roleplaying portion of the forum, we tend to use double-posts because the contents will exceed the character limit if squeezed entirely into one post. Under this new method, will merging keep everything as it should with no chopping of content/formatting due to size?

[synkr0nized]

That's a very good question, and something I had not thought to test out previously. Let me poke around.

---------- Post added at 05:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:53 PM ----------

and the followup:

If the initial post has enough characters that the subsequent reply would push it beyond the max character limit, the auto-merge will not kick-in, leaving it as a new post.

Thanks for the question, and that seems like an appropriate way for the modification to work. I am glad to see that either its coder or the core vBulletin coders accounted for that.