She is NOT a moron. And it’s not her style that’s annoying, either.
Just her content. 
Tht’s gd d. Bcs smtms vwls r wst f gd vws klr qsr bcd.
Psst… pst fft-n (51. W r llwd dgts, rght?)
:smack: M flt bcs wth kls mn fgr www mn.
I find line-by-line rebuttals tedious and usually counter-productive.
Specific lines can be called out if they are odd in the context of the post or somehow stand out. But if the post is really line after line of idiocy, post-parsing isn’t going to do anything but cause everyone to glaze over–especially the person whose post is being parsed, Peter Piper.
I agree that quote parsing can be annoying, especially in Great Debates.
For instance, someone posts an OP or a response that contains, let’s say five sentences. Someone picks that post apart and responds to each sentence with four or five sentences of their own. Then either each of those sentences gets parsed out to a sentence or two a piece, each with a response of four or five sentences. Pretty soon, it becomes this huge wall of quotes and it becomes damn near impossible to find out what they’re even talking about anymore.
Quote parsing has its place, but my opinion is that some people overuse it. It makes for a more interesting (and easier to read) conversation if people would respond to the overall gist of posts instead of trying to score points.
Another vote against the excessive parsing above. I just don’t read posts like that, and I don’t see why anyone else would, either.
Wow. Way to miss my point, VT. :rolleyes:
kaylasdad99 approves this message.
So far the only thing you have told us about that other forum is colossally idiotic, so I doubt that the forum is intelligent as a whole. (Although, granted, perhaps that was their one major mistake; I don’t have the information from which to judge.)
Quoting whole posts is almost universally considered annoying, and it’s a waste of space on the page and storage space in the database.
Replying without any quoting when there is more than one post to respond to makes it very difficult to follow the chain of conversation.
There’s a reason why people only respond to parts of quotes, and it’s specifically because they are doing so intelligently.
And snipe is different from snip.
That reminds me, I was going to add that to the “I don’t get this XKCD” thread. Do you happen to know what the deal with the diode is? Only one complaint can get through?
You have never been this wrong.
Diodes only allow electrical travel in one direction. It’s an even nerdier version of “before we continue this conversation, let’s go to simplex mode”, i.e. I’m no longer interested in listening to you.
Or so I assume. I don’t visit XKCD often enough to keep track of in-jokes.
My opinion is that quote-parsing is an over-used technique, most often abused by highly pedantic posters who are trying to seem smarter than they really are, or perhaps to make their point appear stronger than it really is. “Look at all the ways I can refute your argument,” appears to be what they are attempting to say, when often times a goodly portion of the “refutation” is calling out typos or pointing out instances where the quoted poster pretty obviously simply made a minor error. I appreciate precision of language as much as the next person, but we all make mistakes, and I think sometimes some posters are a little quick to jump on minor errors which, while real enough, don’t really contribute significantly to the overall discourse.
That said, while I don’t have any examples at my fingertips, there have been some pretty epic instances of “quote-parsing” which were just absolutely necessary. Indeed, I think the success or failure of quote-parsing lies in a combination of the quote being parsed and the skill of the parser. Sometimes a post of monumental wackiness can be both eviscerated and made truly entertaining by a skilled poster parsing the hell out of it. I wish I could bring a good example to mind; I suspect they’ve mostly occurred in The Pit, probably around some colossal melt-down. Anyone have a favorite they can link to?
I swear it sounds like you’re fishing for Cervaise’s telemarketer thread, because it usually gets pointed to as one of the most epic Pit threads ever and it happens to be a quote-parser.
I dare somebody to take on Abisafyan, currently littering up GD with eye-glazing monoliths of Qur’anic verses.
[will smith]
“Aw hell no!” [ws]
I’m with you here. Arranging quotes & responses as Shots does in the OP’s links is helpful to me.
I never knew anybody had a problem with this. I always just thought of it as being a polite way to both show clarity and to show that you are reading and noting the other person’s points. There are some fairly involved eebates that would become incomprensible if they were NOT parsed.