Oh.
It seems to me that you weren’t particularly judicious in your use of quotations in that thread, so I would think that means you know how the rules work. It was not clear to me why you felt attributing an opinion to one poster using quotes was awful and attributing an opinion to multiple people using quotes - or “predicting” someone’s opinion with quotes - was kosher.
The rule has already been quoted and explained to you several different ways. The exception proves the rule: C K Dexter Haven’s post says you can’t alter text inside the quote boxes; it follows that altering a quotation outside the quote boxes is OK.
The third paragraph could not be any more explicit: "Text inside
[QUOTE]
tags is sacrosanct."