Collapsable replies to long messages

[rkfg]

I see that replies in riot.im/develop/ quote the whole message which might be quite long (multiple lines or a long story). I didn't find any issues about this so posting one. It could be a simple expand/collapse button like the one for spoilers on forums, by default it could display the first 10 words or 100 characters (whichever is bigger) and the user can expand the whole message by clicking a button or ellipsis in the end. That would save the screen space greatly.

[t3chguy]

This surely applies to all long messages?

[turt2live]

it does, but it's particularly annoying if someone posts an entire essay, then 8 people reply to it with 'looks good!'.

[rkfg]

Yes, I think clients should be able to optionally autocollapse all long messages, not just replies. It could be nice to have adjustable exceptions. For example, I'd like the messages from a particular bot to always appear in full because it sends them after an explicit request and I know I want to read the whole message. OTOH, I'm not so sure this applies to other regular users so I'd like their messages be collapsed by default.

[turt2live]

Collapsible messages in general are https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/4388 btw

Maybe the solution for replies is to truncate the original message at some point.

[rkfg]

Sadly, it's almost a year old and P4 which doesn't look encouraging. And the feature is relatively simple to implement at the same time. But I agree that it's not that important by itself while the quotes in replies must be collapsable or else they wouldn't be of much use.

[ara4n]

it'd be pretty trivial to collapse the quoted portion via CSS, which sounds like it'd be good enough for this (and probably handle collapsible messages a la element-hq/element-meta#1240 at the same time)

[rkfg]

Celebrating the first anniversary of this issue! 🎉 As I said before, the fix is trivial at least for Chrome:

.mx_EventTile_reply {
    overflow: hidden;
    display: -webkit-box;
    -webkit-line-clamp: 3;
    -webkit-box-orient: vertical;
}

I use this via Stylus extension in web Riot but it's not trivial in the desktop version. I wish there was a userstyle feature in the client so I could attach my own styles there.

[pedro-nonfree]

very annoying, let me add an example to ilustrate it

the first image is what you expect in a chat: to send and to receive [1]

and suddenly, the worst case, the reply to long message appears [2], fills all my screen with the content of a previous message that you might read before (:rage1: ) and I still don't know what's the response itself!! (:rage2: ). Then I have to scroll down (:rage3: ). But when I scrolled down, there is a small message (:rage3:), and I lost the previous context and meaning of the discussion (:rage4: ). Then I give up (:rage4: ) and write this message (:writing_hand: ).

I think this proposal applies here very well too => https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/4388#issuecomment-619257146

collapse (read more) if the mx_ReplyThread takes more than 1/3 of the screen

[1]

[2]

[SimonBrandner]

Related: #4388