They are bugging the hell out of me. It seems like every other thread I open up the first reply is a quote of the original message. Is that really necessary? I just read the post, why quote it again? Look down at the bottom, there is a post reply button. At the bottom of the box containing the message there is a reply button, if you let your mouse hover a bit on that button it will say reply with quote. This isn’t just new people, it is people with post counts in the hundreds. Come on, wise up and learn to quote only when necessary.
One reason is to make sure that the new text is a response to the OP, and not to any message that might have been submitted before you complete writing your reply.
Another reason is if you take a long time composing a message, someone (or two or three or four) may have posted ahead of you.
(Resisting the urge to just quote the entire OP and say “I agree!”)
Sure. I’ve seen, and made, what appear to be really off topic posts that could easily have been understood in context, if only they’d appeared a little sooner in the thread, or had some indication of what post they were in reply to.
Some people do get carried away with the quote function though, and they deserve to be ticketed for bandwidth violations, then tarred and feathered.
On one other board where I occasionally post, just about every post includes a post of the previous post in its entirety. And more often than not, the replying poster will say something along the lines of “Yeah” or “Go you!” or something equally inane.
Which is why I rarely go to the board any longer. And I was thinking about posting this very OP myself.
Use the quote and edit it down to respond to the part that you’re targeting, but please resist the urge to reprint a multiple paragraph entry. Please?? For me?
I often try to just quote a relevant paragraph or sentance. For that matter, another approach can be just to " a single word, as in “Stupid”? On the contrary… where it’s clear that you’re referring to the part of an above post where something was called stupid.
I just figured it out. For me, at least, I come from Usenet, where you quote the message you’re replying to, since readers can display threads/posts all kinds of different ways. So you quote who you’re replying to.
That’s my excuse, anyway.