The auto-generated quote tags that are created around quoted text when someone goes to reply to a specific existing post (rather than to the thread in general) either don’t work or don’t work consistently. What’s the story here? All over the board you see a post that looks like this:
…
[QU0TE=SomeScreenName]Blah blah blibbety blah and so on and so forth
[/QUOTE]
Well, SomeScreenName, I wouldn’t put it that way because yakkity yakkity blah blah blah.
…
– do these tags consistently fail to work, always? If so, can you disable them, perhaps in favor of the old vB 2.x style quote tags?
– if they work correctly some (or even most?) of the time, is there something we’re doing that makes them misfire so often? Before the upgrade, one almost never saw bollixed-up quote tags that weren’t doing their job, but you see these
[QUOTE=SomeOnesName]
things all over the board. Or at least I do. Or think I do. (It isn’t just me, is it?)
The only time I’ve seen them fail, is when the user doing the quoting screws up the edit and eliminates a bracket by accident. This happens fairly often with me, it seems. :smack:
Hopefully, this time, I’ve done it right, so as not to provide an unintended demonstration. Heh.
[very evil grin]I’m not sure what the response is.
No, they consistently fail to work, sometimes?
No, they inconsistently fail to work, always?
Yes, they consistently work, sometimes?
Yes, they inconsistently work, always?
OK, seriously, failures are usually from an error, such as omitting a bracket, hitting a wrong bracket, forgetting the slash, etc. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a failure where everything was typed correctly.
When one replies to a quote, one might begin one’s answer at the beginning, at the end or in the middle of said quote. I often misjudge where the cursor is so I sometimes I disrupt the coding that makes the quote a quote. I suspect this is what happens to others.
I don’t think it’s your fault. I’ve noticed that when I try to edit the quoted material, like when I want to eliminate the first few lines of the OP, the text-selection routine in IE tends to pick up the closing bracket from the “QUOTE=” section.
Something similar happens at the end of the quoted material. In this example, for example, if I try to get rid of everything in your OP after “…, it seems.”, the highlight stubbornly insists on grabbing the opening bracket and slash from the “/QUOTE” part. The only way to beat it is to use position the cursor, then just use the DEL and Backspace keys, rather than trying to mouse-highlight the parts you want to edit out.
Or - highlight the text you want to delete - including the opening bracket of the [ / quote] tag, for now. Now, holding the SHIFT key, hit the left arrow once - this will remove one character from the end of the higlighted text. Now hit DEL.
In general, it’s actually easier to delete large blocks of text without your hands leaving the home position - Get the cursor where you want to start (or end) deleting, press the SHIFT key and start forming the highlight you want to remove using the arrow keys (including whole lines by using up/down keys). At the end hit DEL. If you just want to remove the next word, say, hold down CTRL-SHIFT and hit the right arrow - voila!, the word is hightlighted… etc…
It’s actually easier, and certainly better for your wrist, than going to the mouse in the middle of a typing spree.
Yeah, I’ve noticed it does that, and that’s the problem. I do know it does this, but sometimes I miss it anyway, and a bracket gets nuked accidentally, resulting in a nicely screwed-up quote. Oy!
Dex, I’m going to remember that. (…he says ominously).
Well, if it’s a selecting thing: what I do is hold down Shift-Alt and use the arrow keys to nab a word at a time, just like you’d do in a word processor. Never grabs extraneous symbols (in fact if you want it to snag a symbol you have to release the Alt key so as to get one character at a time).
- Get the cursor where you want to start (or end) deleting, press the SHIFT key and start forming the highlight you want to remove using the arrow keys (including whole lines by using up/down keys). At the end hit DEL. If you just want to remove the next word, say, hold down CTRL-SHIFT and hit the right arrow - voila!, the word is hightlighted… etc…