Allow multiline reply comments.

When you first share a story, you can comment on it, and use as many lines as you want (or so I assume; the actual number of lines is at least two, which is good enough for these purposes).

However, when replying to a comment or share, you are limited to just one line. This is extremely limiting (duh), and frustrating.

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I realize it can be frustrating, but it’s also putting a cap on the amount of dialogue that’s on NewsBlur. It’s just not the greatest place to have a thorough back-and-forth, and limiting yourself to one paragraph makes it a whole lot easier for others to read. It’s a purposeful limitation and simplifies things for the people who then have to keep track of what’s going on besides new stories.

Hmm, that’s unfortunate. The entire “sharebros” (I hate that term) phenomenon, and the reason for the fanatical devotion to Reader, was driven by *preciesly* that ability. As my friend Allen commented aside in a share conversation, “Also, replying in-line to shares is so awesome again; fuck you, Google!”

So that raises the question: *why* is Newsblur “just not the greatest place to have a thorough back-and-forth”? Would doing so cause undo resource consumption for hosting it? Is that simply not “the intended use”? If I just wanted an RSS reader without rich interaction with my friends, I’d use Feedly or something like that. The ability to share with friends and talk about the share was the entire reason I signed up for Newsblur, and encouraged everyone I know to do so.

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Hello? No answer on why exactly NewsBlur is not supposed to be used for exactly the reason that everyone wants to use it?

If you have multiple paragraphs, submit them as separate replies. That’s how I’ve been doing it. But if you support multi-line replies, then you can’t hit enter to reply anymore.

The *universal* GUI convention when “hit enter to send” is enabled is to allow shift-enter to insert a newline. I’m ignoring the part where enter-to-send is obnoxious. I’m also ignoring the part where you equate nine words with “a paragraph”; in my example graphic, I had to think a bit in order to find a phrase that fit in the text box without cutting off, and nine words was the limit.

Anyway, I do sincerely thank you for replying, as well as for the effort you’ve put into it, AND for open sourcing it. But, here is where we part ways. It’s clear that NewsBlur will never be an acceptable replacement for Reader.

If a design decision of this small of a magnitude is enough to have you leave NewsBlur, I can’t imagine you’d stick around for long anyway. There are a dozen different design decisions per pane that I make as part of the NewsBlur experience that don’t care about the Reader way. I never used Reader and whenever I did I found it just as infuriating as you find NewsBlur. You might be better off using the open-source code and changing around things as you see fit.

It’s not this one decision; this is merely the proverbial straw. I agree with you about the utility of forking it, and for the ability to do THAT, I am in fact immensely, sincerely grateful. I don’t regret my premium NewsBlur account purchase one whit.