Great idea!

Glad you think so! And that was me selecting your message and clicking the Quote button, and having this nicely formatted quote just happen automatically. I still need to add a handler for just citing a message without selecting/quoting specific text (for example right now it would show up as > [1456]) but progress has been made.

This is based on part of the concept of a quote plugin available for MyBB that pops up a button to quote message text. Technically, that version has more features (preserving formatting for some reason?), but I'm not touching it with a ten-foot tentacle. The plugin includes two screenshots, one of the feature working in an actual MyBB instance and one painfully obvious AI-generated equivalent of literally the same exact thing. Y'all know how I feel about AI crap, so I wrote my own version from scratch rather than use it and possibly infect my web space with slop code.

AI examples... terrible. What are we coming to.

And literally next to an actual screenshot of the actual feature doing the same thing, too. Like it's just there to impress AI-obsessed supervisors or something. (Incidentally, I'm hearing about more companies explicitly rejecting applicants that describe themselves as skilled with AI, because they're starting to realize those people basically have no creativity and critical thinking LOL)

Back to the topic, the quote above is just written with > [1493] and no actual quote, and now it reads the message being quoted if you didn't specify what text to highlight. This can be done just by clicking the Quote button without selecting any text. Messages are truncated to 200 characters, end early if they hit a newline, and ignore quote blocks within the quoted message. I think this turned out decently.

Looks great!

Testing highlight...

I will say, my quote trimming regex might be a bit overzealous, since that first (quoting post only) example skipped over to the second paragraph of my message. But it already seems better to me than the vanilla quoting features.

Since I was already in a string-modifying mood last night, I also tweaked the front page news section. It only cuts off at a maximum length now if the actual news post does not contain a markdown horizontal divider (---). If it does, that is considered the summary break, which I think makes it look a bit more professional than cutting off with an ellipsis halfway through a sente...

Great idea, the refining is looking excellent.

And then when Mikot... (lol)

"N-no, please, I beg you!" Mikoto wailed at the bulging tentacle. "That's too big to fi...

I'm gonna make an exception in the no-AI rule for posting things to mock... This is that "screenshot" of the select-to-quote plugin that I think I quite justifiably rejected. It gets worse the longer you look at it.

• The heck would a "previous" button do on a Quick Reply field?
• The Quick Reply window itself looks like a twisted version of the OverType composer we're using now, except that's not even a feature native to MyBB
• Speaking of non-native controls, why does the post have like/dislike buttons and a bookmark feature? And what's that plus button for?
• I assume this was the idea of the plugin creator to call the feature "Quote+", but really, what a corporate-social-media-sounding name that is.
• There is no BBCode formatting in the highlighted post, but the Quick Reply pretends there is. Also, the whole quote is in curly brackets, but so is the... oh. Oh god. Absolutely every possible thing is wrong with the formatting in that composer window.
• For the icing on the cake, try to read that code that's streaming out of the selected quote for whatever reason.

My best interpretation of the one on the right:
Heremigpum |
hoalim
<italas
<name="reply">
<filpeftion \
lorSre="\l\h"
herlthat="\not.
<div href=|"BBCode
)\
classtfeum
<div href="Ja">
</dl>
</>

Yeah, I'd definitely trust that thing to maintain code for me...

Had a pair of web crawlers hit us shortly ago from FB/Twt, and since then a bunch of guest connections (about 30) consistently exploring. But not really exploring, because not a single one is getting out of the front page. I can only suspect they're bots that don't understand the 18+ warning.

I'm hoping the updated warning still effectively keeps bots out by leaving that hurdle before the registration page, but I can't help but also consider that the current system is most likely a huge thorn in AI scrapers' sides... which I also kinda love.

Edit: Okay, three of them got past it, one of them in fact hitting the registration page and one going for the RSS feed. Technically speaking, these COULD be real legitimate users, but this is a pattern I've seen before... and the "registrations" don't lead anywhere - they don't even make it to failing the security question, as per the logs.