Topic lightbox?

[KT Walrus]

I'd like the option to have a "Show Topic Post in Lightbox" for the list of topics in a forum view. This would be similar to the Topic Hovercards but would be wider and centered in the current browser viewport and the topic post would be shown in its entirety and properly formatted (rather than being raw text truncated at some max length).

This lightbox would be similar to the Photo thumbnail lightbox and use AJAX to fetch and format the post.

In addition to having some icon to click on in the forum view, there should be a BBCode for referencing a post (topic or reply) to be used by members in creating links to posts in their posts. This would allow the reader to not switch to a new page just because they want to read part of a referenced post. Indeed, the Quote Box could have a Topic Lightbox link for viewing the quoted text as highlighted text in the full topic lightbox.

I got this idea from using Safari where there is a READER button to view the main post of the page in a lightbox without any of the page's other clutter. This suggestion goes a little further than this, but we could skin the lightbox to show the text in a bigger font too for those of us who have vision problems. I end up using my Safari READER button a lot just because the text is bigger and more readable.

Just a suggestion...