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Done Change quote syntax

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Felucia

Felucia

Robot Empress
is a Forum Moderatoris a Community Contributoris a Battle Simulator Moderatoris a Metagame Resource Contributor Alumnus
I talked about this briefly with staff in the past and was told it's not worth changing, but the amount of times I've seen someone use /quote 5 thinking they're going to view a quote is honestly getting ridiculous.

I think the current syntax is just about the worst case scenario for intuitive design, as misunderstanding what /quote does means you accidentally add a quote and then have to revert your mistake. An alternative would be to default /quote to view a quote, and require /addquote for adding quotes. This solves the problem, because there's no repercussion for misusing a command that displays quotes.

However, I don't think this is feasible, because people may be confused about the sudden change in /quote syntax. That's why I have the following proposal: Change quote syntax to match existing systems like events and tournaments.

  • /quote add to add quotes
  • /quote delete to delete quotes
  • /quote view to view quotes
  • /quote list to list quotes
  • You get the gist
You can alias /viewquote if you want backwards compatibility, but /quote without arguments should error into the help menu.
 
Hi, we discussed - I’m retracting this approval, since this has been convention for years. What I will do instead is make it so /quote [num] parses /viewquote (while still quoting when it’s not a number) which should fix the problem without requiring a complete overhaul. I’ll try to get to this tonight, if not someone else can nab it.

edit: done, also after some discussion we moved it back to just /addquote and made /quote the help table.
 
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I don't think it being convention is a good reason to keep identifiably bad and confusing design. My proposed change not only solves the problems with the command, but also does so in a manner that immediately makes the changes apparent to anyone trying to use the feature, as /quote defaulting to a help menu explains to users what they did wrong.

Edit: Convention is also mostly a reason that ties into people's habits, but it's evident that people still haven't gotten into the habit of the convention. If anything, convention on PS is to use multi-part commands, like /event, /tour, /hangman, /announcement, /poll, and the list goes on
 
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