ActivityPub

Note that I said "quoted posts", not "quote posts", don't @ me!

After the last WG meeting @thisismissem@hachyderm.io @trwnh@mastodon.social and I chatted a bit about how NodeBB handles quoted posts, but also in relation to quote posts. I thought that it was an interesting chat that merited further discussion; also because some of it was over my head.

When asked how NodeBB handles blockquotes specifically, I replied that blockquotes themselves are rather simple. We set a copy of the text wrapped in <blockquote>.

The rationale is simple: forums typically represent content in a linear fashion, and quoted posts are a handy way to reinforce subcontext within a topic. A typical topic/thread could have many separate discussions all happening together (aka thread drift), so quotes help others know what you're responding to. We don't have special handling or references to our blockquotes because there is a history in forums of edited blockquotes.

Perhaps you want to have a block quote and add some emphasis?

It's also better netiquette (god, that term is old) to trim down the quote to only the relevant parts.

Another upside is that a copy-paste of a post preserves that post to history. That can be useful if the quoted user tries to edit their post later, etc.

vis-a-vis the concept of "quote posts", which I take to mean an embedded post within a post, allowing for replies, likes, etc. How that is represented via ActivityPub is probably detailed in some FEP, but NodeBB doesn't implement that yet. It's a more complicated mechanism that requires a lot more thinking through, and to be honest, we haven't had the need for that in the 10+ years we've been building NodeBB.