I understand why you changed the setting, because the quotes inside quotes inside quotes could be headspinningly annoying.
On the other hand, in exactly the sort of threads that were most victim of the overquoting, the longer debate and discussion threads, it becomes really burdensome, when quoting a post quoting another post, to track “once-removed” quotes that the post you’ve quoted is responding to. As far as I know, the only way is by opening other windows to find the post or cutting and pasting directly from the page, which sucks. And if you quote more than one person or a person who has quoted many others, it snowballs into a really huge pain in the ass.
Even a direct and simple way to know the post number or something…anything to speed up and simplify keeping prior quotes straight.
This is exactly what I have thought, except I never actually recommended it. But yes, O have seen other message boards do this and it doesn’t seem to be a problem there. In fact! I think that is the default way of doing things. It actually seems helpful rather than annoying to see all the previous quotes.
There is no really easy way that I know of. Something you can do is, before clicking on “post reply”, to use each quote link arrow to display the original post, then click the ’ "+ ’ button (just to the right of the “quote” button) on that post. After you’ve done this for all the quotes you wanted, click on “post reply”. The reply page will come up with all of the desired quotes copied into the input area. Then you can rearrange them as desired.
Yep, that’s what the +1 button is for. Just like I did above (but wisely edited out too long or unnecessary parts… overly lengthy quoting is bad netiquette).
But then you can make your own nesting by moving the bottom quote to the end of the previous quote going bottom up using highlight and drag. It will then look like this:
One last way is to highlight and copy the nested quotes and past them into the editor and add the quote tags yourself (button for it on the advanced editor window).
Yes, but you have to manually do that, and that’s what the OP is saying is a pain in the ass (and I agree). By default, it should already do that for you if you select quote. It should automatically include the nested quotes. For some reason, this board has disabled that, and I am not exactly sure why. I think Stoid is suggesting that this board re-enables the automatic nesting of quotes. Is that right?
Stoid is asking for a work around since nested quotes is off. Some way to look at a quote and see the post number it was quoted from, more easily than following the arrows back to the posts.
That’s about the best option we have - follow the back arrows and then multiquote them. If you’re doing a manual scroll through the thread to find the prior quotes, then this will be an improvement.
The SDMB had nested quotes enabled a couple of years ago. But a lot of people screwed up the quotes (I can’t remember how) so the feature was disabled. Personally, I copy the innermost quote to a Notepad window temporarily and then recreate the nested quote. But it’s a pain in the neck.
We actually had them from way way back, then they were disabled, then someone (Giraffe?) suggested we add them back, and people managed to screw them up.
They screwed them up when they wanted to delete the nested quote, and accidentally deleted part of the coding for the original quote tag (usually the “]” at the end of the first tag). This is because when you select a lot of text, it will sometimes automatically include adjacent non-alpha characters. And because even after being active on this board for many many years, many of our posters still have absolutely no clue how quote tags work.
This is fairly error-prone, however, and people are liable to get the quoting backwards. For example, someone might attempt this and accidentally make it look like the first three posts of this thread were Stoid quoting Anonymous User quoting rowrbazzle.
Manually nesting quotes does require more effort, including how the quoting works and how to code them. And paying attention to what you are doing.
Autonested quotes is tedious when not required (almost always) and the way the feature seems to work is prone to people mangling the quote tags when attempting to edit.
Far better for people to realize there’s an effort and not attempt it because they know they don’t know how than to make it seem simple and then have them screw up because they don’t know how.
Heck, some posters don’t even know how to copy-paste. I’ve seen quotes made by retyping entire posts. (the giveaway is when the “quote” introduces typos that weren’t in the original post)
It’s such a bummer when we all have to be inconvenienced because some people are…ahem…less than savvy. For a board like this one, which by it’s very nature attracts a more competent, savvy, ignorance-fighting type of person, it seems counter-intuitive to set things up for the convenience of the least competent, savvy, ignorant-and-apparently-content-to-remain-so among us.
Except this is a short thread with short posts and few participants. I invite you to pick a long thread with long posts, lots of participants, on a complex topic. Go back 24-48 hours, start reading from there.
Then pretend that you don’t want to clutter up the thread by immediately responding to each post as you read them, starting with posts that were made 48 hours ago (in some threads, an hour ago!), only to sheepishly discover as you go along that find that your “new” reply is either redundant or irrelevant because of later posts you personally hadn’t read yet.
So you sensibly (and courteously!) employ that marvelous little button (I only learned about a year or two ago, I’d been doing it the hard way before that…) that lets you mark each post you might want to respond to as you read, finish reading, hit reply and have all your interesting posts quoted together, allowing you ***to review and delete whatever you initially thought you would reply to but later realized you didn’t. ***
Then, begin replying. But wait… the composition of the material makes it clear that in many cases, since the original writer had quoted a post and was responding to the quote, you now have no clue what they were referring to! Making it necessary to slog back through the thread and find the post and see what they were responding to…
Now tell me what a snap it is.
**COMPARE - **
Sometimes some people screw it up and make it hard for the rest of us to read it because they are apparently (selfishly) OK with posting it all screwed up instead of (courteously) using the preview buttons to make sure they got it right.
And as a result of that, the courteous among us must be forced to do the former so the selfish among us don’t have to take any time to learn anything.
The reasoning that led to this being the situation kind of escapes me; if this were a board targeted at the lowest common denominator in content, it would make perfect sense. Or if this was a board devoted to discussions about cooking, or sex, or movies, or some other specific interest where the point is to give every numbnuts with an opinion a chance to participate
Except this is a short thread with short posts and few participants. I invite you to pick a long thread with long posts, lots of participants, on a complex topic. Go back 24-48 hours, start reading from there.
Then pretend that you don’t want to clutter up the thread by immediately responding to each post as you read them, starting with posts that were made 48 hours ago (in some threads, an hour ago!), only to sheepishly discover as you go along that find that your “new” reply is either redundant or irrelevant because of later posts you personally hadn’t read yet.
So you sensibly (and courteously!) employ that marvelous little button (I only learned about a year or two ago, I’d been doing it the hard way before that…) that lets you mark each post you might want to respond to as you read, finish reading, hit reply and have all your interesting posts quoted together, allowing you ***to review and delete whatever you initially thought you would reply to but later realized you didn’t. ***
Then, begin replying. But wait… the composition of the material makes it clear that in many cases, since the original writer had quoted a post and was responding to the quote, you now have no clue what they were referring to! Making it necessary to slog back through the thread and find the post and see what they were responding to…
Now tell me again how you don’t find it cumbersome.
**COMPARE - **
Sometimes some people screw it up and make it hard for the rest of us to read it because they are apparently (selfishly) OK with posting it all screwed up instead of (courteously) using the preview buttons to make sure they got it right.
And as a result of that, the courteous among us must be forced to do the former so the selfish among us don’t have to take any time to learn anything.
The reasoning that led to this being the situation kind of escapes me; if this were a board targeted at the lowest common denominator in content, it would make perfect sense. Or if this was a board devoted to discussions about cooking, or sex, or movies, or some other specific interest where the driving ethos is to give every numbnuts with an opinion a chance to participate, that’s fine.
But it isn’t. It’s the Straight Dope, the spawn of Cecil Adams, World’s Smartest Human, Devoted to Fighting Ignorance Since 1973. Presumably people who come here like to learn things.
Why aren’t we asking people to ***learn ***how to edit their posts properly, instead of making the people who do know how do all that extra work?
Dunno, Stoid. I’d prefer nested quotes to be enabled too, but if you’re at the point where constructing your quotes and replies manually becomes too cumbersome to manage, maybe that’s a sign you’re posting too much.
More like too infrequently. If I were posting too much I’d be right on top of every reply the minute it was made and wouldn’t have to go back so far. Which was the case when I was posting too much.