For anyone who’s interested, here’s the thread from 2010 when nested quotes were turned off again. Nested quotes have been discontinued - About This Message Board - Straight Dope Message Board
I too wish nested quotes would be turned back on. I wasn’t terribly inconvenienced by the occasional screw-up, and I managed to figure out the proper context most of the time. But I can’t agree with the above.
We all have different levels of competence in different areas of endeavor. If you need to deal with a spitting cobra or a black mamba, an eagle or a crocodile, call me – that kind of thing is my wheelhouse. I’m a pretty savvy guy in a few other areas as well. But when it comes to coding, well – not so much.
What might be useful, but probably would require a hack of vbulletin, would be adding a “nested quote button” next to the “quote button”. That way a user could choose to include or not include the nestings, and wouldn’t have to struggle with the manual deletions that seemed to cause such a problem. Since nested quotes can be turned on or off globally, I’m confident somebody with the requisite skill set could find a way to turn it on or off for individual posts. But again, that skill set sure isn’t mine.
ETA - another hack-- since those deletions were often screwed up because the “]” was auto-selected along with text, could the quote facility itself be modified to insert a " " (space) before/after the brackets? Then text selection tools might more easily select only the proper portion of the quote. Making it easier for us less-skillful non-coders.