Hi Mark,
The job of editing a topic's thread to remove unnecessary or
duplicate images due to reply non-trimming can be a bit
time-consuming. Right now, the only way to
efficiently do
it is to open and fully expand the topic in one browser tab, see
what messages need editing, open those messages in Single Message
View in new tabs, do the edits and close the tabs, then refresh the
Topic tab and re-expand all quoted text bits again to make sure you
didn't miss anything. That re-expanding part can take a bit of
mouse clicking if the topic is rather long with lots of them
showing, and makes the job more time-consuming than it could be,
especially if the person editing the messages is not as
apt/knowledgeable, and they are doing the cleanup within one tab by
editing in-situ while in the Topic View screen; when they are
returned back to that screen after editing the message, they have to
re-expand them again, so in that usage scenario it takes even
longer.
IMO it would be a useful time saver if when one is in the Topic
Message View screen and has expanded some or all of the "Show Quoted
Text" bits, if they F5-refresh the page or if they edit a message,
when they are returned back, the screen retains the state of those
bits and renders accordingly. Right now it resets back, and one has
to re-expand them.
I thought of a few alternative ways of achieving this if keeping the
quoted text button state is not practical, they would accomplish the
same end.
1: In the main message screen, a new option in the Topic Options
pulldown, maybe "Trim Topic", "Clean Topic", etc, which would open
the Topic View screen with all the quoted text bits rendering
already expanded:
2: Or a variation of no.1 but in the Topic View screen this time;
some "Expand/Collapse All ..." button/checkbox/whatever at the top
or bottom of the Topic view screen, clicking it would expand (or
collapse) all the displayed quoted text bits in the topic.
3. Or in the message display area, a small icon indicator next to
the show/hide button, which would indicate if the quoted text
contains images or attachments, something like this for example:
You'd still have to expand them again in this case, but it would at
least give you a visual clue whether there are images contained
therein that message's quoted text, so if you were specifically
hunting for images, you would know not to bother expanding the ones
that don't show it; or if you were currently cleaning-up dupe
images, you would know you took care of removing them in that
particular message.
Cheers,
Christos
