Problems With Quoting

[alfreema]

We have an intermittent problem when someone tries to quote someone else. The symptom is that the entire post gets lost and is replaced with the single word "Array". I don't know nuttin' about nuttin' but I am guessing if they leave out a brace in the bbcode somewhere it might be confusing some javascript somehow, but I haven't been able to reproduce it myself (thought it's happening to many of my users). It always happens when someone tries to quote, that I know.

Is this a known issue and is there any fix for it?

[Mark.B]

Not heard of this...we'd need a means to reproduce it in order to progress it further.

[alfreema]

Not heard of this...we'd need a means to reproduce it in order to progress it further.

Okay, I will try to do so and post back here.

[alfreema]

Apparently this is happening when a user is being quoted that has a full inbox. I just set the "Private Message Permissions"-->Can Ignore Quota to Yes to see if that gets me past this problem.

[Mark.B]

I'm not sure that PM quotas work 100% as they should in vB5. They are obsolete anyway, they date back to a time when database storage space cost a lot of money and so it was important to restrict its use. This doesn't apply today and restricting people's PM use is just archaic. You might as well restrict the number of posts made.

What I tend to do, rather than using the 'Can ignore quota' setting, is simply set the PM quota to something silly like 30,000 PMs.

All of that said....if you can prove this quote issue is related to full inboxes, please report it as a bug in the bug tracker.

[alfreema]

I'm not sure that PM quotas work 100% as they should in vB5. They are obsolete anyway, they date back to a time when database storage space cost a lot of money and so it was important to restrict its use. This doesn't apply today and restricting people's PM use is just archaic. You might as well restrict the number of posts made.

What I tend to do, rather than using the 'Can ignore quota' setting, is simply set the PM quota to something silly like 30,000 PMs.

All of that said....if you can prove this quote issue is related to full inboxes, please report it as a bug in the bug tracker.

I believe I can prove it, but I like your attitude better! I'll open up the PMs wide open!

[Wayne Luke]

With the introduction of vBulletin Messenger, built on top of PMs, the quota for PMs was switched from a per message quota to a per topic quota. Each topic can have thousands of messages in it.

[alfreema]

With the introduction of vBulletin Messenger, built on top of PMs, the quota for PMs was switched from a per message quota to a per topic quota. Each topic can have thousands of messages in it.

Can you explain that a bit more? I don't understand how PMs relate to Topics in terms of quota?

In the Usergroups, I had the quota set to 200 PMs and had many users crashing up against that quota because the Dragonbyte Thanks/Like plugin was causing a PM for every Thank/Like (which turns out to be a show stopper for using that plugin, but that's a different topic for discussion).

Let's use a ridiculously low number for quota, just so I can understand it. Let's say I set it to 5. If a person sends a PM, that would be one of 5 slots gone (their outbox). If they receive a PM, that would be 2 slots gone (one in their outbox, and now one in their inbox). How do Topics enter into the equation in this example?

[Wayne Luke]

In vBulletin 5, PMs work just like posts in a topic... You start a conversation and then participants reply to that conversation. They appear as a topic in your message box.

So if a person sends a PM, that is one slot gone. If they receive a reply that is still 1 slot gone. If they send a reply, that is still 1 slot gone. If they receive a new reply, that is still 1 slot gone. The entire conversation should take 1 slot. If they send a PM to the second group of people, that is 2 slots gone and so forth.

The inbox/outbox paradigm needs to be removed from the software. It doesn't make sense. There is no copy in the inbox and another copy in the outbox. It is just one conversation. It works more like modern Messenger apps than Email from two decades ago.

It is the starting post in the conversation that uses a slot in current versions of vBulletin.

[alfreema]

Excellent explanation, and makes complete sense now.

I receive a ton of these PMs: "You have been quoted at .... Forum". Each one of those I assume is also chewing up an individual slot, which is spammy similar to the Thanks/Like plugin. Is there a setting that will stop those from being a PM and will just be a Notification?

[Wayne Luke]

vBulletin doesn't send a PM for a quote as far as I am aware. At least I never get one. It should only send notifications. Check your notification settings under User Settings -> Notifications.

[alfreema]

vBulletin doesn't send a PM for a quote as far as I am aware. At least I never get one. It should only send notifications. Check your notification settings under User Settings -> Notifications.

Okay, then I bet it's the Dragonbyte User Mention plugin causing that. I'd love to turn that off, but then all the old user mentions end up looking like

[mention]username[/mention] 

If I update the database and swap all the opening and closing "[mention]" tags with "[user]" tags, will vBulletin render all the old "mentions" properly, or is it trickier than that (meaning I have to do more than update just the single table that contains the mentions)?

I guess I am also asking if the bbcode user mentions are dynamically calculated each time a post is pulled up or does some magic happen one time when they are submitted?

[Wayne Luke]

They should work if the text is updated to use the [user] bbcode. You might have to clear your cache first.

[alfreema]

They should work if the text is updated to use the [user] bbcode. You might have to clear your cache first.

Awesome. I will do that late one night after backing up the database.

[Glenn Vergara]

I think the default user mention requires the userid. The bbcode format is:

[user=xxxx]username[/user]

Where xxxx is the userid.