The “which is preferable” argument is moot: we tried the nested quotes experiment, we encountered a huge number of problems with badly edited quotes that often led to quote misattributions, we decided against allowing nested quotes.
There is absolutely no intention at this point to bring them back.
twickster, for the SDMB
Yes. Really, Rhythmdvl, to an extent I appreciate your “this is why we can’t have nice things” frustration. But given what has been demonstrated about the ability of people on this board to correctly edit out unwanted nested posts, I for one am glad to see that there is no intention to return to using them in the foreseeable future.
There’s another board I post at where people are able to handle having them, and it doesn’t really bother me to have to edit them out when I don’t need them–but seeing posts constantly getting broken in very bad ways here was just ridiculous.
I get you aren’t, but, jsut for teh edification, may I ask how much problem there was, not with the existence of the misattributions themselves, but consequences of the misattributions? In other words was it a case of: “Dammit, eveyrone is screwing this up! it’s not working, stop it!” or “Dammit, everyone is screwing this up, and as a result, there is a huge rise in anger, fights, personal misunderstandings, and overall misery.”
Cuz. if it was A…yeah, well, so? If it was B…pretty weak that it was happening, understandable that you addressed it the only easy way you could, taking away the toys everyone was fighting over.
There was a significant number of people who were pissed off that words they had not written were attributed to them.
I’ll echo this. I got many many more reports about misattribution under the giraffed system.
I actually benefited from the system, the quality of my quoted posts improved substantially due to misattribution.
What puzzles me is that we had many years of nested quotes before they were discontinued with nary a complaint.
Then for a short time we stopped them. I really can’t recall exactly for how long but my best guess was for a couple of years.
Why we bothered to try again with nested quotes if they were a problem just a few years before is puzzling.
It didn’t take very long for the recent experiment to fail.
Why no problem with nested quotes for many years ?
Why a problem with nested quotes after a few months ?
Now that’s funny.
I have posted here for over ten years, and never saw nested quotes until the giraffication.
I don’t recall having had it here either.
Same here. To the best of my recollection, we never had nested quotes here before the recent experiment.
Well I’m simply going to have to concede that maybe I’m wrong. This is truly worrisome to me.
It’s a sad state of affairs when a messageboard that prides itself on its superior intellect is incapable of handling nested quotes, a function that 13 year olds on anime boards can handle with nary a problem.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not get crazy here. I’m quite certain we used to have them. As evidence, I submit this post from 2004:
And this one from 2003:
Whew !
Thankyou Giraffe ! I was beginning to think that I should get tested .
So it’s been 8 years? I thought I remembered nested quotes for the first few months I was here but it looks like I was mistaken. I have always hated nested quotes on any messageboard and strive to remove them whenever possible. During our Giraffe-inspired test run this ended up being virtually every post, and it was a huge PITA. I probably managed it correctly 98% of the time. Does that make me an incompetent worthy of derision?
I have to agree with the quote from minty green. Nested quotes get carried along for the ride far more times than they’re needed, and it very quickly devolves into an eyesore on par with animated avatars and giant blinking hello kitty signature pics.
We’re better than that, people. The raison d’etre of the SDMB is clean communication. Nested quotes run contrary to that. Here on the Giants.com messageboard is an example of what nested quotes lead to “in the wild.” (Keep scrolling down the incredibly busy page to watch them grow even more as the conversation continues.)
Equally sad that those people who have the rare occasion to nest quotes can’t manage to do it without imposing it on Every. Single. Quote. the rest of us make.
Multiple quotes are not the same as nested quotes.
That’s true, but in that thread Una used the term to refer to nested quotes. (See this post.)
They can. It’s just a fuckton more work than 5 seconds with the backspace key.