Quote formatting and minor UI quibbles

First, the little things.
When back-reading a long thread it does not seem possible to know what page of the thread I am on, only if it is the first, last, or in the middle. The page selection buttons all look the same and since the pages of posts are dynamically loaded I can't just glance at the URL to verify what page I am on.
This makes it rather frustrating to read through a long set of posts, then reply to one a few pages back after I have caught up. I can't just jump to the page it is on, instead I have to keep track of how many times I have clicked the next button or if I forget wait for every page of comments to load as I walk back through the posts.
I think that highlighting the current page in with some kind of visible selection indication would be nice. Either a different color/shade or have it appear inset with its shadow rather than embossed. This should also have some kind of indication in the HTML to make it legible to screen readers.

When clicking the New Topic button to create a thread from a page within a specific board, I think that board should be set as the default location for the new thread.

Heading, paragraph, and list formatting would be nice to have.


Second, the bigger and likely more controversial ask.
I would like to be able to format arbitrary text as a quote, edit the contents of a quote linked to another post, and quote the OP of a thread. Being able to set off-site links as quote link targets would also be nice, but I don't care as much about this part. .
When replying to longer posts and especially posts which contain multiple quote replies it is much more legible to show exactly which paragraph or sentence the quote relates to. Arbitrary text quoting would allow quotes of off-site text, quotes from non-forum parts of the site, quotes for narrative play in forum adventures, etc. I think these use cases would also benefit from setting an arbitrary quote link, that way quoting a page of a comic, a site rule, a product description, an off-site blog post, etc. could have the same UI interaction to go directly to the quoted text rather than only being able to make a separately formatted link to click.
I expect that being able to edit someone else's words in a quote might raise some hackles, but I honestly do not think that this will be a problem. It is already possible to misread someone else's post when replying to it, and to misrepresent someone's argument. To my understanding doing this maliciously is already in breach of the rules/COC and would be reported to mods.
For some context on my perspective, the vast majority of my time in forums has been on private torrent tracker forums. Mostly What.cd/Gazelle derived, but with plenty of other platforms mixed in. These have a variety of levels of moderation quality and strictness of enforcement, but across all of them very permissive post formatting. In my experience this style of quote formatting did not promote abusive behavior and even on poorly moderated sites was not a preferred method of misrepresentation. After all, anyone could view the replied post and so it was really just showing your ass as engaging in bad faith.
On the flip side, this was a huge boon for analytic and technical discussions because it made it very easy to bring in outside work and to clearly track several lines of conversation in a very asynchronous discussion.

I know that BBcode formatting is a planned feature, and IMO when this does come I would really love for it to allow more flexible use of the formatting tools.
IMO this would be best done with a modal editor, something where we can switch between the existing WYSIWYG editor and plaintext with inline formatting markup. This allows exposing much more flexible formatting tags without cluttering the UI, and avoids the confusion inherent to mixed formatted and markup text (IMO Discord is a great example of how to really screw this up).


Thanks for all the hard work y'all have put into this place, I look forward to enjoying engaging with it a lot more.