Quote from archived forum to active forum?

[Antechinus]

This is just a tyre-kicking thing at this stage.

Say you have an archived forum that is read-only. For reference in discussions on the newer, active forum it would be convenient to be able to quote content from the archived forum.

Obviously you can do the whole thing manually: highlight/copy/paste to the new forum's reply form, then add the reference link to the original post. But, what if you wanted to simplify the process?

If quoting is allowed on the archived forum (but not actual post submission) that entire quote could be copy/pasted to the active forum. The catch is that the back end will automatically assign the post ID and user ID from the active forum's database, not from the archived version, which will screw things up.

However: if you modded the archived forum such that quoting there automatically assigned an absolute path in the BBC, that could potentially work. Copy/pasting the whole thing from one editor (archived) to the other (active) would preserve the correct url's.

This is possible. Is it reasonable?

[Kindred]

Not easily (I don't think)
Quotes are always assumed to be in the CURRENT domain/path/forum.

So, modifying the quote to include the full url, etc would require modification to the quote bbc on the archived forum, and on the target forum... and would also require a user to be able to create a quote on a forum which doesn't allow reply/posts

[Antechinus]

Yes I am aware of those details. I know it is going to be tricky in some ways.

Obviously you need to modify the quote BBC on the archived forum, but that should essentially be a matter of deliberately NOT assuming a relative url, and pulling out an absolute path instead. This is doable, because the standard relative path is just a shorthand for the absolute path that is also stored in the db.

The target forum is (I think) probably not such an issue. You can use quotes with or without author details, so offhand I think (ha!) that pasting in a quote with absolute url's instead of post/user ID's should be ok. It will probably require an extra (optional) definition for the quote tag, but I think it could be made to work.

Allowing quoting to the editor while disallowing actual post submission should be simply a matter of blocking the submission process somewhere convenient.

[Arantor]

external URL

Code Select Expand

[quote author=https://example.com/]
external URL
[/quote]

The first hard part is butchering the various routes that handle quoting, e.g. action=quotefast to permit returning an actual quote when reply is otherwise disabled (see Post.php in QuoteFast to figure out what permission checks you will need to savage), rewriting the quote bbc therein is fairly simple at that point because if you have the message ID you can reverse engineer a full URL out of it, example.com/path/to/forum/index.php?msg=123 works even in 2.0

The second hard part is what the UI should look like - if you're just going to give them a button to click that dumps the post with the pre-made quote bbc into clipboard, you're basically done at that point. Anything else is a level of pain you probably don't want to get into around trying to push content between tabs (which is only really viable if they're on the same domain or, possibly, with some work on different subdomains of the same domain)