The ones that bug me the most are the people who quote an entire longer post to reply with one sentence.
Yookeroo writes:
>>We have one poster here who thinks this is Usenet
I don’t know who you mean.
Quoting when posting from a mobile device can be a proper nuisance - touchscreen browsers don’t always provide very good ways of selecting part of a passage of text, leaving the user with the options of either quoting the whole post to respond to one sentence, or creating their own pseudo-quote containing just that sentence.
Was this in the Games Room by any chance? I think I know who you mean.
My main objection is that the quote feature automatically puts things inside the quote tags that aren’t part of the quote. It’d be like using quotation marks like
“John said I like pie”
instead of
John said “I like pie”.
But it turns out that, for reasons I still can’t fathom, most people like to see quote boxes containing things that weren’t part of the quote, and that moving things that weren’t part of the quote outside of the boxes annoys them, so in the interest of keeping the peace, I’ve changed styles.
That too.
I only have one person on ‘ignore’. She does that all the time, and the one sentence is never worth reading. I put her on ignore because I got tired of scrolling through a long post I’d already read, only to find that the comment payoff was never worth the effort it took to get there.
Maybe so they know who said what so they don’t have to go back and reread the thread to find who said it. Now off the top of your head, going back through the thread to find out is cheating, who said the quote above yours.
Is there really any difference between.
Chronos said.
and
I try very hard not to quote any posts when I’m browsing the Dope from my tablet, because it’s a pain in the ass. On more than one occasion, I’ve subscribed to a thread and then gone back to it later when I’m on a real computer with a keyboard and mouse, so I can quote properly.
Is it any wonder why there’s people manually typing out excerpts from others, using Usenet canonical quoting, and so on? This is also the same board where the mere suggestion of any change brings out the pitchfork- and torch-wielding crowd.
On the message board I run, I’ll occasionally get an email from someone asking me to post an included response in a certain thread. Uhhh … why not register an account and do it yourfuckingself?
There’s one thing I don’t like about the quote function; when idiots use it instead of italics or quote marks to quote something from outside the board.
No, that was NOT “Originally Posted by President Obama”. (altho it would be cool if he *was *a poster, eh?
I guess it’s because email is typically one-on-one, and the person you’re replying to knows what they said, so it’s not as big a deal that they need to be “reminded” of it. So top-replying works fine.
But on a message board, lots of people are reading the thread, so it’s best to show them “ahead of time” what you’re replying to.
There’s still a few people where who top-reply when quoting, and it annoys the ever-living Hell out of me.
It’s almost as bad as the posters who
feel the need to make posts like this
when typing because they think it’s
1993 and they have to enter hard
carriage returns in their text editor.
Or something.
Fair point. I suppose I should be glad only one poster does this.
Yeah-did that for the first few months here, because if you didn’t put hard returns into Usenet posts, they’d scroll on forever to the right, which in that milieu was almost universally frowned-upon. I got better. 
Usenet? 
To put it simply, Usenet was/is the old-school message boards long before the world wide web even existed. These days, it’s more commonly used for illegal file sharing.
Usenet was one of the Big Things on the early internet. It functioned kinda like message boards. It was divided into “newsgroups” in a huge hierarchy. Most parts of the hierarchy were heavily regulated. If you wanted to add a newsgroup, there was a formal voting procedure that you had to go through in order to get it approved. Because of this, there was also the “alt” section of the hierarchy (for “alternative”) where the rules were much more relaxed and pretty much anyone could add a newsgroup. There used to be an alt.fan.cecil-adams, btw.
In the earlier days of the internet, usenet started out as a way of getting news of new features and projects out to other folks. Over time, it grew to be more generic, and when the internet in general switched from highly skilled computer users on unix boxes to much less skilled windows users, usenet became much more general public.
One of the most common annoyances on usenet was crazy big .sigs (a .sig was a signature that was automatically appended to your posts - by convention they were supposed to be four lines or less). But by far the most common annoyance was people who quoted entire page-long posts just to say something like “me too” or to make some other simple one line comment.
Usenet started dying out when web sites began to rule the internet and message board software was created that could be site specific. Then all you had to do was click on your favorite site and use its message board, instead of wading through the quagmire of usenet’s thousands and thousands of newsgroups.
Unlike a message board, where posts are kept on a single local server, usenet posts were distributed out to each isp. If your isp didn’t receive them, you had to find a public server that did. This made a lot of sense when usenet was used to send out news for early developers, but it is hugely wasteful of space when usenet began to be used as generic message boards.
Google still keeps a lot of usenet archives. I don’t know how far back they go. Here’s one you can read, for example:
Note that everything on usenet is plain text, so the appearance of the newsgroups can vary quite a bit depending on what newsgroup reader you are using. Some newsreaders will make it look like a modern-ish message board. Others still retain the clunky basic text type of look.
ETA: BTW, a common convention back then was to name machines for their purposes. For example, a domain like straightdope.com was very likely to have ftp.straightdope.com as its FTP server, www.straightdope.com as its web server, and news.straightdope.com as its usenet server. These conventions started disappearing when www took over the internet and folks mostly stopped using everything else.
Agreed.
Yer showing yer age dude (or lack thereof). 
Some Usenet and UUNET history . . .
The Internet and Usenet go way back, even before the World Wide Web, and well before it was common for nearly everyone to have internet access. As early as the 1970’s or even late 1960’s, the Internet (then called the Arpanet) connected just a few well-placed academic institutions, research organizations (typically major Telco outfits like Bell Labs), government sites, and maybe some military. This was called “The Backbone.” Local networks hung off of the nodes of that, thus the meme that the Internet is a “network of networks”.
There was also an informal and rather ad-hoc network of sites called UUNET, whereby sites dialed up one another over plain-old telephone lines with modems and exchanged files that way. I worked for a laser printer company in the mid-1980’s (as a Unix sysadmin) that was connected this way. These networks were organized as telephone trees. Early users were mainly researchers, programmers, computer scientists, and the like, who used these means as a new way of keeping professionally connected.
Usenet was big in those days, being the rather ad-hoc network of message-boarding that evolved. Some forums were moderated and some were not. Various major sites served as “interfaces” where UUNET content could be interfaced with Internet content. UUNET was also used for e-mail and file transfers.
There was really no such thing as an ISP in those days, at least not in the sense that we now understand them.
The Internet in those days was profoundly and jealously NON-commercialized. No advertisements to be seen anywhere. Nobody actually paid money to connect to Usenet. The major backbone sites were in it for their own needs (often financed by government grants), and in effect they subsidized all the outlying small-fry nodes than hung on to their coattails.
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s or so, the Internet began to be available to the rest of us common plebians, and companies sprung into existence to sell connections services commercially. These became the ISP’s as we now know them. Likewise, everybody who thought he had a business plan began creating internet sites (especially with the invention of the World Wide Web), combining content with advertising. Established (mostly academic) users of that era were aghast, AGHAST!!! not to mention disgusted, dismayed, and thoroughly revolted at the prospect of the Internet getting commercialized.
And yes, I do occasionally stumble upon web sites with archived Usenet content, with posts that I and others made as far back as 1985 or so!
Has anyone ever pointed this out to said to poster, and/or what was the explanation?