Odd things happening with my quote boxes

Old Hack

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I've noticed a few times now (a couple of times on my comments here, and a couple of times on others' comments) that when one breaks a quoted comment into smaller chunks, and those smaller chunks contain paragraph breaks, sometimes each paragraph is enclosed in its own separate quote-box.

As I'm not explaining this very well, here's an example of what I'm trying to describe.

If you look at the link you'll see that there are seven quote-boxes shown in my response; but only the first one is a single quote box. The other six are all arranged in pairs, and there should only have been three of them.

I've tried editing my comment in case I added extra para breaks or something when I typed it up, and deleting the extra {quote} and {/quote} tags as I go, but those tags just insert themselves in there again when I click save no matter what I do.

I know it's not a big deal but it's driving me bonkers. I like my comments here to look nice, and not to have all sorts of extra divisions in them! Am I doing something wrong, or is it a thing I cannot overcome?
 

alleycat

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How are you breaking up the quotes? Manually putting in quote and /quote tags?
 

Old Hack

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When I break up the quotes I type in {quote} and {/quote} where I need them (only with straight brackets, of course) or I might just hit the "quote" button at the top of the reply box (the slightly yellowish speech-bubble thing), or I might copy-and-paste the quote tags into place.

I've even tried copying the whole thing into Word and typing my response there: but it doesn't seem to matter how I do it, every now and then I see those extra boxes. I can't spot any consistency to it, either. And I have seen this happen in other people's posts here too.
 

Deleted member 42

The [quote] and [/quote] tag and its attributes (the ID of the quote and the ID of the quoted post) are not paragraph based, but block based.

That is, they are like the Blockquote HTML tag. They enclose and offset a block of text which may or may not contain internal paragraph or line breaks.

Is it possible that there are hard returns that aren't showing, or that you're inserting tags you don't need?
 

Old Hack

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Lisa, first I tried deleting the new and unwanted {quote} {/quote} tags, but that didn't help.

Then I tried deleting the tags and the words either side of them, then retyping those words but not putting the tags back in. That didn't help either.

And Cao, that might be so, but I don't know how to see those various tags, so don't know how to correct this thing. Which is a relatively new problem here, by the way.

Sometimes I am so clearly inept. I really need classes in this sort of thing.
 

Deleted member 42

Here's the actual bbcode tagged text from the post you linked to:

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana][QUOTE="MadMax, post: 0"]I am not explaining myself well at all here.. ideally I wouldn't have to include much of the others work at all...[/QUOTE][/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]Try not to worry. It's difficult when you don't know the writing world, but we'll get there. One way or another![/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana][QUOTE] The reason I say this is because the volume of information I need to explain to others is already immense.. but people won't understand MY PART of the story without having this background info from other sources I speak of. [/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana][/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]This [/FONT][/COLOR][COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]is like trying to convey a semester or year of college in one book. what I need to do is to teach people enough about science to understand the things I have discovered.. but this is science few people in the world have an understanding of. [/FONT][/COLOR]
[/QUOTE]

There's a hierarchy to tags, and the way they're parsed.

The Quote tag needs to be first.

Cao Paux is telling you that you've got the Font tags in the wrong order. She's right; the first set of color/font tags got caught outside the opening quote tag.

What I do generally is just remove font tags. vBulletin and users insert them in odd ways; notice that there are also duplicate Font tags that are not actually around text. They don't do anything.
 

CaoPaux

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Hmm. Don't know how to help you with the not-seeing, alas. Maybe go for the nuclear option of Remove Text Formatting (
removeformat.gif
, to the left of the Fonts selector)? That strips out the offending tags altogether (you have to select the text block first, though).
 

Old Hack

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I've had a look at the post in Chrome and (eugh) IE, and I can only see the quote tags and not the font or colour tags. Do I need to look at them using some option other than just "edit post"?

I can't use Firefox as it won't work on my somewhat elderly laptop. That will change next week, I hope, when my new laptop arrives. Hurrah!
 

Deleted member 42

I've had a look at the post in Chrome and (eugh) IE, and I can only see the quote tags and not the font or colour tags. Do I need to look at them using some option other than just "edit post"?

I can't use Firefox as it won't work on my somewhat elderly laptop. That will change next week, I hope, when my new laptop arrives. Hurrah!

OK; that's just weird.

Edit post should should show all the tags.

Clicking the Quote button
quote.gif
to respond to a post should copy not only the text of the post you are quoting, but any BBCode tags in the post, and wrap the entire post in a pair of Quote tags, with a user and post attribution.

Are you using any kind of javascript blocking plugin, like noscript?
 

Old Hack

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No, I'm not using anything like that.

I wonder if this laptop (which is, frankly, struggling) might therefore be to blame: but I've noticed other members' quotes showing the same issue, so I am not alone here.

If I see it again I'll add a link here, just in case.
 

Deleted member 42

No, I'm not using anything like that.

I wonder if this laptop (which is, frankly, struggling) might therefore be to blame: but I've noticed other members' quotes showing the same issue, so I am not alone here.

If I see it again I'll add a link here, just in case.

Is it possible that your local settings are odd?

Check the options in your AW User CP
Click the link for Edit Options on the left, under the Settings and Options heading
Scroll down to Miscellaneous options at the very bottom

Which Editor are you using?
 

Old Hack

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Lisa, I'm using the "Enhanced Interface--full WYSIWYG Editing" option.

Only I've noticed that when I use Firefox and IE, I get WYSIWYG, but when I use Chrome I don't: for example, if I highlight text, then click the "link" button (the globe with the chains) then provide the link and click ok, in Firefox and IE the highlighted text suddenly looks like a real link in my "reply" box, whereas in Chrome I can see the surrounding codes. The same thing happens if I highlight text and click "bold" or "italics": in Firefox and IE the text turns to bold or italic, but in Chrome I can still see the {I} and {/I} tags. Does that make sense?
 

GrayLensman

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Old Hack said:
The same thing happens if I highlight text and click "bold" or "italics": in Firefox and IE the text turns to bold or italic, but in Chrome I can still see the {I} and {/I} tags. Does that make sense?

Old Hack, for all my love of I.T., I can't code worth a damn. So I usually keep a respectable distance from that.

In broad, though, you're running into a feature in Chrome that (I think) Chrome has turned off by default.

You probably know the site uses PHP. I think the WYSIWYG editor uses Javascript to convert from the UBB buttons to the displayed WYSIWYG display.

I'm guessing at that last. But Chrome has Javascript turned off by default. At least, I think it does. It's under Settings, Advanced Settings, Content Settings.

Being a paranoid old guff, I use a proxified form of Mozilla browser, so I can't test it on my copy of Chrome.