I’m more likely to get annoyed when people don’t crop what they’re replying to.
If you write ten paragraphs, and I have no comment on nine of them, I’m only going to quote the one I do want to comment on. That’s the polite thing to do, and most message boards I’ve been involved with ask their members to do it that way. It’s good netiquette.
Threads are long enough and hard to enough to read now at times without quoting every post in it’s entirety each time you respond to someone. Crop it for readability and clarity.
I subscribe to at least one email discussion group where they WANT you to quote the whole damn thing. They also want that placed BEFORE your response.
They send these things out a “digests”, basically strung together posts and the email responses as one long email.
So you get a long post. Then you immediately get the long post again, with maybe a small comment at the bottom. Then the same again and again and again.
Seems downright retarded to me, but apparently some hardasses who run the things think it makes sense :rolleyes:
Throw me in with the “quote only what’s necessary” crowd. All too often on boards which let you post pictures, some tard will invariably quote someone else’s pic-heavy post and you’ll get 3 screen’s-worth of duplicated & pointless bandwidth-sucking images.
I appreciate your brevity. But I’m also in the quote-just-enough-for-context camp. Mostly because I’m a slow typist and a half dozen responses usually get in before I manage to click the Submit Reply button.
IMHO, it’s only rude to quote part of a post when you’re ignoring the important bits to harp on the misspellings (or whatever).
Add me to “quote just what you’re replying to.” No one needs to reread an entire post to understand the reply – it’s already in the threat if they want to. If you have a direct comment on a part of the post, quote that.
Things are different in email groups (at least the ones that aren’t doing digests). You don’t have that threaded context. On a message board, if I want the full text of your post, I have it.
If you are responding to only 1 point of a 10 point post, why repost the other 9 points?
If true, this is an argument for cropping, not an argument against.
And yeah, you’re being oversensitive.
What, all the old emails dissappear into a black hole or something?
If you can’t figure out exactly whats what, you can always go back and find the email that started it all.
And in digest format it IS retarded IMO.
As the sort-of cause of this thread, I’d just like to say,
I always do it because I hate it when people quote the whole of a post even though they’re responding to a fifth of it, and
It never occurred to me that anyone would be offended by it since I don’t cherry pick words or sentences to make you look silly- but I apologise for doing it, since it does offend you.
If everyone had gmail, no one would have this problem. 
Yay for threaded conversations.
Wrong! “I’m gonna address this one issue.”
Heck, no, the idea is to quote the most-relevant bits, not the whole original post!
If people quoting other papers in their own articles had to include the whole original, articles would have to be published in serialized form…
They may indeed be passing over (not dismissing - there’s no call to assume the worst) everything else because it actually is irrelevant to what they want to add to the discussion. What the hell is wrong with that?
It only bothers me if the clipping distorts what the original post was saying by leaving out important context. That’s dishonest debating. Otherwise, it’s just a method of keeping the thread from getting clogged up. I recall another forum I visit where you ARE supposed to quote the whole thing, and it can get difficult to find the one sentence that’s actually new in the walls of text.
Yep, bad netiquette. Cropping the post also shows which part you’re replying to, out of a ten paragraph post.
It’s not just rude to alter someone’s post on the SDMB. It’s forbidden in the Pit. Might be forbidden in other forums, but I know it’s forbidden in the Pit.
I crop when I want to just discuss one point. For example, you probably meant “I’m dismissing everything else you write…”
If and when I do crop, I try to make sure that it doesn’t dismiss something salient or take the poster’s words out of context. More commonly it’s because I’m only commenting on one point, as in dalej42 mentioned above.
So, yes, you probably are being overly sensitive. Perhaps you could link to some specific instances you thought were rude?
I’ve done it in the past. I just feel it’s better to cut only the parts you need, and not the whole thing. If someone cropped my posts, I wouldn’t be offended.
Seems strange that only the OP has this view. I have never come across an argtument, anywhere on the net, to repost the whole thing as long as context is maintained.