** Apos… **I have asked you about this nicely at least twice previously, and to my knowledge, you have not answered me.
Which means, to my great sorrow, that I must drag you here to the Pit and shout at you and abuse you mercilessly. I must tie you to a chair and dunk you repeatedly into cold water, causing you to sputter and weep and beg me for mercy. I hate it, but I must then stretch you on a rack and pull your arms and legs until the joints pop and you scream and promise me anything if only, if only I will stop. I will have to taunt you and manipulate your mind, break your spirit and leave you a babbling heap at my feet.
And you know why. I know you know why.
Don’t give me that innocent look, ** Apos. ** Don’t even try it.
Fine, I’ll spell it out.
It is because, after nearly a year as an active posting member of The Straight Dope, one who is rapidly coming up on two THOUSAND posts, you STILL refuse to use the handy quoting codes readily available to you in every post you make, and instead persist in using triple dashes — to begin and end — your quotes.
Do you have ANY idea how grossly this disrupts my rhythm when I am trying to quickly scan a thread, DO YOU? I ALWAYS have to stop, back up, and figure out WTF is going on in your posts!! ARGH! FUCKING CONFORM GODDAMN YOU! Go be a rebel someplace else!
It could easily be worse. Back in my usenet days, there was a fellow on one of the groups I hung about on that would not use any standard reply delimeters. He would use a single asterisk preceding quoted lines–and often reply a singlespace right below. Like this:
In article [usenet article stampcode foo] Stoid wrote
*YES!
NO!
This routinely lead to immense confusion down the road of who said what. THAT was rack-worthy.
I don’t think I’ve been here a year: more like a few months. But I’m sure I’ll figure out what “quote” and “attribute” mean eventually. Right now I’m only up to “acousma” http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=acousma&r=3
I like these sorts of idiosyncracies. I like Vorlon’s username squeezing thread titles into spaghetti and creating the need for horizontal scrolling. I like guessing at whom Apos is quoting and trying to track down where his quotes begin and end. I also like sarcasm.
