Whatever you do, don’t tell him how many crippled tags with a missing bracket are out there. 
Hey Flamsterette_X, it’s nice to be noticed. It’s good to be back – I wasn’t anywhere special, just had a lot of things going on and needed to take a step down in my SDMB time. Thank you for asking. I see you’ve continued to make the most of your time here as well. I’m sure we’ll be hearing from each other again soon.
femtosecond, I wonder – all the times that people screw up and post [****b] * and [****i] ** – do you think it all evens out, or are there unpaired tags of that sort out there too?
That’s the second reply to me from someone posting in the wrong thread in two days. Is something wrong with me?
Both, XHTML. Thanks for a clue what to look for. From the XHTML specs: XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition)
XML doesn’t allow unpaired tags, so in XHTML <br /> is a backwards compatible abbreviation for <br></br>. Now I don’t really want to know why vBulletin uses a different standard for the post-generated code than for the rest of the page.
White Lightning, which one of us will go and ask Jerry to shut down the server for a few hours to search through the database and count them?
My question on quotes is hoiw do i quote just oine or two lines and not the entire post ?
Just use the quote function and delete whatever you don’t want to quote within the ‘quote’ tags. However, it’s a good idea to indicate somehow, either with <snip> or dots, that you have only quoted part of the original text. (And in GD you will invariably be called on “quoting out of context” anyway).
Note that it is a big no-no to actually change the words within someone else’s quote (with the exception of adding emphasis such as bold or italics, and even then you should clearly indicate “emphasis mine.”)
Just edit the text that appears between
.
If I want to quote part of a previous post (and in the fora of which I am a habitué, that’s most of the time) I normally copy and paste the particular material that I want to quote, inserting the appropriate codes before and after (which have been explained above ad infinitum. In particular, if I want to respond separately to several points made in a single previous post, it’s simplicity itself to type in the close-quote code in the middle of the quoted material, my response to that, a new open-quote code, and so on.
What is/are the policy and coding requirements on nested quotes these days?
) Since we’re being picky about this sort of thing, I thought I’d close Polycarp’s parenthesis.
Use Preview!
Yes, ]b[ plaese preveew[/i[ !!!
Different people are behind it. The folks at Jelsoft decided how they wanted posts to be formatted, but that’s all fitted into a template created or customized by folks here at the Straight Dope.
Hey, when I took a 38-hour, 15-minute break from the SDMB from Wednesday night till this afternoon, and told various people about it, they were VERY surprised. The reaction ranged from “Uh, I can’t breathe now.” to “Wow! Flami actually taking a break from the boards? I can’t believe it!” So yeah, I kind of know what you mean, if only on a smaller scale. Heck, if I did that for as long as you did (and it wasn’t even that long), people would be hounding me to see where I was! 
As for my making the most of my time on the boards, I guess that could be true. Just don’t try to read all my posts from when you left to when you came back… that’s guaranteed to make for a lot of reading. 
(but you might want to read the Spoz welcome thread, and the thread that inspired it… just search for the keyword “Spoz” in MPSIMS during the past month or so)
And as for those screwed-up coding tags, I’ve done that at least a few times, perhaps even as recently as today. You’ll most likely see **[.b] or something like that from me, caused by my typing too fast and hitting the wrong key.
F_X
Apparently, I’m also making a lot of double-posts to mark my return to the boards after that unprecedented break. :rolleyes: I think it’s the “no matter how quickly you hit the Stop button after you submit your post, your screw-up still posts” rule. Sigh…
F_X
Sheesh, didn’t I say I don’t want to know? Nice theory, but the board at www.vbulletin.com itself uses the inconsistent style, the Dope just adopted it. Oh well, it just shifts to different people, but in the same company.
femtosecond, haven’t you learned by now that the quickest way to learn something at this board is to say that you don’t want to know it?