Quoting the quoted message

I’m currently testing Quote functionality and found one issue which may appear to be a major one in my concern: When user make a quote to an already quoted message, a spam reply is created in the backend.

@enkoes

This is my current primary focus. I’ve tried to replicate your issue, but it is working exactly as expected on my test server.

The only thing that comes to mind without being able to verify is that you have Moderation Tools activated (wp-admin/options-general.php?page=bbp-style-pack&tab=modtools) …

and you have “Hold for Moderation” set to include “All posts below the English character threshold” (wp-admin/options-general.php?page=bbpress%2F#bsp-moderation) when your forum has a mixture of languages including Latin, English, Chinese, and more.

If that’s the case, every post or quoted post that is below the specified English character threshold will automatically be marked as spam.

Your Style Pack settings export will help me to verify that, or find another possible cause.

As for the second part of your topic:

User should not be shown the quote link for the quoted message in the first place to prevent user to make second quote from the quoted message.

@enkoes

I’m not sure that truly makes sense. That means any post could be quoted UNLESS it contains a quote. In other words – from an end-user’s perspective – If you want your comment to be quotable by others, DON’T include a quote from anyone else. If you don’t want you comment to be quotable by others, INCLUDE a quote from some one else.

Your picture indicates that’s exactly what you would like to have happen, but it doesn’t make much sense from an end-user’s perspective, and would even be confusing to users: why some posts can be quoted but other posts can’t. It would seem/act like the quote system was “broken”.

What I think would make more sense is to prevent nested quotes (a quote within a quote). Users can still click the “Quote” link, but only the post content gets quoted….not other quotes within that post. Is that what you’re actually trying to achieve?

Until I can make sense out of this in a way that’s helpful and potentially useful for others, I don’t have any plans to start working on this yet.

The spam issue at the top is #1 priority, and I suspect it’s a setting value, or possible conflicting plugin.

First: I’ve not activated moderation in Bbp Style Pack (pls check your email for exported settings)

@enkoes

Got the file export, and confirmed that. What I need to know is what plugin you’re using for anti-spam. Can you go to the “Plugin Information” tab in Style Pack (wp-admin/options-general.php?page=bbp-style-pack&tab=plugin_info) and scroll down to “Site Plugins” and then copy/paste that list either here or in an email to codejp3@gmail.com

What I suspect is that you have an anti-spam plugin that auto-blocks any content that contains HTML tags. Quotes contain blockquote, div, span, and p HTML tags which seems to be triggering your anti-spam plugin.

Second: About the concept of ‘quote within quote’, I want to know how many level can it adopts

@enkoes

There is no limit. Theoretically, it could be infinite nested quotes. However, in my experience, I’ve never seen it exceed 5-6 levels deep, even in really long/active topics with lots of people quoting each other.

I fully welcome your suggestion that quote link should not be removed from the quoted message, but rather when users click the “Quote” link, only the post content gets quoted. NOT other quotes within that post. this will eliminate loads of repeated irrelevant message which is quite distracting.

@enkoes

I have made these changes and plan to release it shortly. @robin-w is working on another addition related to theme compatibility, and we’ll probably merge the two and release it in the very near future.

New Option in “Quotes” tab:

Front-end result:

Update: Quoted posts marked as spam/pending

We resolved this issue through email, but I wanted to share it here in case others run across this issue.

Cause: Too many links within post content. Blocked by the WordPress setting for comment moderation, which affects the whole site, including bbPress topics/replies. Quotes include links to the quoted user’s profile, and are counted as links within the topic/reply content.

I’ve included 3 possible solutions below, and they are in order from least preferred/effective up to most preferred/effective.

Solution #1: Increase the amount of allowed links in Settings > Discussion > Comment Moderation (/wp-admin/options-discussion.php). This will fix some cases where this is happening, but not all, and will affect the entire site (not just bbPress).

Solution #2: Disable the WordPress comment moderation settings specifically for bbPress topics/comments. You can do so by adding the following code snippet to your site (child theme functions.php file or with the Code Snippets plugin):

// disable WordPress discussion checks within bbPress content
add_filter( 'bbp_bypass_check_for_moderation', '__return_true' );

Credit for this code snippet goes to @ajtruckle from this topic on bbPress support forum.

Since this disables comment checks in the forum, you may want to enable the moderation tools within the Style Pack “Moderation” tab (/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=bbp-style-pack&tab=modtools) and set them up according to your preferences (/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=bbpress%2F#bsp-moderation) for good measure.

Solution #3 (preferred): Make sure links that are within the current website do not get counted against the number of links within posts/topics/replies. For an unknown reason, BuddyPress uses this technique, but WordPress core does not. THIS is the root cause of the issue, and this technique specifically addresses that root cause, while the previous 2 solutions are just workarounds. In order to prevent local links from being counted as part of the number of links within posts/topics/replies, add this code snippet to your site (child theme functions.php file or with the Code Snippets plugin):

// prevent local links from being counted against comment moderation max links
function custom_comment_max_links_url( $num_links, $user_url, $content ) {

        // How many links?
        $num_links = preg_match_all( '/(http|ftp|https):\/\/(.+?)([\s\'"])/i', $content, $matches );

        // Neutralize the current site's URL.
        if ( isset( $matches[0] ) && is_array( $matches[0] ) ) {
                foreach ( $matches[0] as $found_url ) {
                        if ( 0 === strpos( $found_url, home_url() ) ) {
                                $num_links -=1;
                        }
                }
        }

        return $num_links;
}
add_filter( 'comment_max_links_url', 'custom_comment_max_links_url', 10, 3 );

THIS is the preferred solution since it allows the WordPress comment moderation link limit to remain in effect as intended, but does not count local links against that max links limit.

I hope this is helpful to anyone experiencing this issue.

@enkoes – glad we got it resolved. Expect the new release with the option to disable nested quotes in the near future 😉

@enkoes – version 5.5.8 was just released which includes the new option to disable nested quotes.

Sorry it took a little longer than expected. I had to make it work with ANY combination of quotes that it could possibly encounter (single quote, nested quote, multiple single quotes, multiple nested quotes, and any combination of single and nested quotes).

Marking as resolved, but feel free to post here if you have any issues.