We actually turned it on for a while.
Unfortunately, so many posters got tangled up in the syntax, leaving misattributed quotes all over the board, increasing the calls for help to the Mods, and irritating so many posters who were “misquoted” that we wound up turning it off, again.
And here I thought that’s how Colibri did it.
This is my favorite Manhattan quote:
There’s another good one in there:
(On the subject of nested quotes from earlier posts.)
I would think that disabling nested quotes would make the problems worse. Having it enabled, shouldn’t it just work automatically with no fuss by the user? Or did the problems come up because users tried to hand-edit the quotes and make a mess of it?
OTOH, with nested quotes disabled, you still have some people doing them the hard way, where you have to construct the inner quotes by hand. For those who try to do this, doesn’t that create a lot of “tangled up in the syntax” too, or maybe even more so?
If you just nested quoted with the auto feature, then it would not misattribute, but the board would be full of lengthy restatements of what had just been argued in detail, just to add a one liner or a short statement of rebuttal. The board would be cluttered with repetitious crap.
As an example, consider email chains where you get the messages appended. Or, just go read some other boards that have nested quotes on. It is tedious and messy.
So people using nested quotes would trim the fluff and irrelevant bits and whatnot. But when doing that, it is easy to miss a close quote, or fumble an open quote, etc. That generated the misattributions. Further contributing to the difficulty was the formatting of the attributions with poor spacing that made separating the text visually when performing the editing a trifle challenging.
So why does it work better with any nested quotes being fully manually coded? Because when the feature is an easy one button click, the people who attempt to use nested quotes don’t have to be good at manual coding. But when they attempt the edit, their lack of skill affects the outcome. Whereas currently the only people who use nested quotes are the people who are more comfortable and more practised at coding, and thus generally more successful in their coding attempts. (Everybody can screw up, but the screw ups are less frequent.)
I’m sure this must have been explained before (probably more than once), but what constitutes “board activity” when there’s been no posting? Do you mean that simply browsing through a forum counts as “board activity”?
Thanks.
Yes, it would mean logging and and probably reading some threads, or perhaps sending private messages. Just not posting.