Brilliant suggestion whose time is overdue

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1

The quote tag always attributes authorship as “Originally posted by <whoever>”. But in this crazy world, sometimes we find it necessary to cite sources other than an internet message board, leading some to use the “quote=” property to attribute the material. Problem is, there’s this misleading attributional text that gets tacked on:

Hm. Tom Jones “posted” this? What do I make of this? Is Tom Jones actually an SDMB member, or did a Tom Jones impostor create an SDMB acccount, or did somebody just think it was cool to use a Tom Jones quote? Since Tom Jones is a household name, the answer is obvious. But for lesser known sources, this is a problem.

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So, what is your suggestion?

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Oh yeah… the actual suggestion: Introduce a new tag that boxes the content and introduces it with a more appropriate message than Originally posted by:

I humbly suggest the tag be called [cite] and the intro text simply be “Source:”

I don’t know how difficult it was to implement the spoilerbox, but this should be in about the same league.

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No. If you don’t want the “originally posted by” just enclose the text with the quote /quote tag. If you do, enclose with quote=whoever /quote.

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Like that?

Tripler
Shoot, now you’ll want footnotes and all, and I left all that behind in high school. :smack:

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A word of advice, Brain Wreck. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. :slight_smile:

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Oh.

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There’s two secrets to all special posting. One is to skip the special posting and just use words - as though you were saying it in an email.

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Oh, I love this; all the ads say “Tom Jones.”

TubaDiva
It’s not unusual.

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How about this?

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How did you do that? That’s exactly what I want to do, put my own attributional text in the box.

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I assume what Lakai did is manually enter the coding, something like this:

[ quote ]Originally said by Tom Jones
It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone.[ /quote ]

But without the spaces in the quote tag.

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Now the ads are all “Home Drug Test Kits”. That must be meaningful somehow. Do they know something about Tom Jones that we don’t? As a brit, can I even say that?

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JeffB is correct.

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So- (as the doctor said when I told him “Doctor, it hurts when I do this”) don’t do that.

Try this: “But according to Tom Jones: 'It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone”. :stuck_out_tongue:

And, what makes this better, when I am quoting your post, I can include your quote by Tome Jones in there without a lot of rigamarole. In fact, I’d liek to see a rule against using the QUOTE BLOCKS for anything but quoting another post/er.

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Just hit the “reply with quote” button on any post where you are curious about how they did coding. The quoted text will show you the tags. For example, how did I make this post? Reply with quote to find out…

When I first joined here, the “reply with quote” button would actually put in the full “originally posted by” text, instead of the much simpler “quote=name” tag.

So what now appears in the reply box as:

Used to appear like this:

Back in the day, this meant that quotes weren’t all-italicized, which IMO was slightly better than it is now. However, I love how easy it is to use the newer quote and post tags, so I love the new features.

Basically, in the words of Microsoft, what you are complaining about is a feature, not a bug.

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Asked and answered multiple times, this thread can be closed.

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Except for quotes in the post you’re replying to. That’s a very good tip, but it doesn’t work for this situation.