But what is the advantage in making the nesting the default? Why make people change their habits, and produce a lot of misleading errors along the way?
Because for those of us who want to use nested quotes, it’s a hell of a lot easier to have the system not auto-strip out the inner quotes than to go laboriously go searching back up through the thread to re-quote each inner post (and inner inner post and so on) into the appropriate place.
The board worked this way for years and no one ever complained. People are only complaining about the switch back now because they’re not used to it. Soon enough, they’ll be used to it again.
Sure, it’s easier for you, if you want to nest quotes. But I’m thinking it’s worse for the board. Just what proportion of the time do nested quotes actually enhance the contextual understanding? Sometimes, surely. But most of the time? Often enough to make it worthwhile to require everybody who doesn’t need nested quotes to strip them back out? And to tolerate introduced errors when that is done imperfectly?
Anyway, it looks like the other thread on the matter is collecting complaints, so I’ll leave further discussion to that one.
Oh sure, blame this shit on me. Like I know what the hell I’m doing. :dubious:
Er, I think you’re being jokingly self-effacing, but in case I actually did offend you: I didn’t mean anything personal. It was just a dispassionate observation that you happened to be the one whose post introduced the coding mistake.
They say that about the Israelis and Palestinians learning to get along, too.
I blame Bush. Or Obama. Depending on which day it is.
But seriously, if we had nested quoting before and switched, there must have been a reason for switching in the first place. This problem of repeating others’ mistakes unwittingly I don’t see as progress either. I liked it just fine before.
But then, I also like butter churning.
Can we kill this “feature”. Creates more opportunity for mistakes and creates more work when editing a quote. A step backward all around.
Nested quoting was removed in a VB update. It wasn’t anyone here’s decision.
A Ha! Then it really WAS The Man sticking it to the people.
Ouch. Quit poking me!
FWIW, this is the thread where (a) it was suggested how to easily re-enable nested quoting and (b) people are discussing how they feel about the change after it was implemented.
A lot of us, including people who were positive or neutral about the idea before it was enabled, aren’t happy with it.
Part of the problem is that the quote tags all get munged into one line as follows:
[ QUOTE=Siam Sam;12734868][ QUOTE=IvoryTowerDenizen;12734865]
Stuff ITD said
[/ QUOTE]
Stuff Sam said
[/ QUOTE]
which means that if I’m editing in a hurry, and strip out ITD’s quote and the close quote, I might parse the beginning as
[ QUOTE blah blah blah blah]
(that is, a single quote tag), strip out the close-quotes, and not notice that I’d accidentally blamed ITD for something that Sam said.
Carriage returns after the [ QUOTE] tags in the coding would go a ways toward eliminating the problem.
Yeah, just a feeble attempt to be humorous at my own expense. Now, if you’d said “Hey dumbfuck, you don’t know dick about no quote shit”, I 'd maybe have been offended. But only about your grammar.
Yes, how dare anyone use a dialect that isn’t approved by rich white Americans…
What the hell are you nattering on about now?
Multi-quote – now THERE was a good innovation. Change is not always bad. But I feel the evil of nested quotes.
I did. And I do again. And even for those who didn’t complain back in the day, it’s possible – dare I say even likely – because they didn’t know any better. Let’s see if I can dig up some of those old complaints.
Here’s a good one, starting in post 14 in a thread devoted to what we hate in other boards. It’s from 2007, meaning we had already come to understand the awesomeness of not nesting quotes by default. Note the conversation from post 37 through 41.
Sadly I can’t seem to find my older posts on the subject. I may not have been using the terms “nested” and “chained” at the time.
Yeah, I was worried that my “no one” was too strong. (Some mathematician I turned out to be). Fair enough.
I actually hate it so much that I created filter in Adblock to block the nested quotes until this is settled (or permanently if it isn’t). It seems to work better than getting angry and failing to convince anyone because I act like a dick, anyways.
ETA: Here are the filter rules for Adblock Plus (the second is for the word “Quote:”):
boards.straightdope.com##TD.alt2[style="border: 1px inset ;"] DIV.smallfont[style="margin-bottom: 2px;"]
boards.straightdope.com##TD.alt2[style="border: 1px inset ;"] TD.alt2[style="border: 1px inset ;"]