This thread is a thank-you card of sorts to the posters who take the time to quote the post right before theirs in its entirety before adding their replies. Yes, I know I just read the post but you are so thoughtful and perceptive that you know I’m far too busy and important to remember the post I just read so you quote it (all of it, no less) for me.
I’m putting this in the Pit because I’m almost certain some ungrateful Doper will come along and tell you how utterly fucking annoying this practice is. Ignore them, for they know not of what they speak.
So, thank you, dear poster. If it weren’t for you, I’d have to do such trivial and mundane things as remember the thread I just read. You, Sir or Madame, are simply indispensable.
[sub]To the first poster who takes this post, quotes it in its entirety and adds a pithy reply along the lines of ‘you’re welcome’, well, let me just tell you I find such original and unanticipated humor dead sexy. Dead sexy, I tell ya.[/sub]
Yes, there’s been at least two recent pit threads on this.
And again I point out, it’s useful to quote who you are responding to, in case another post comes in while you are writing yours. If you don’t quote, it can look like you are responding to the post than snuck in while you were writing.
And sometimes, you must quote the whole post for clarity.
b) Oh, he’s the bringer of something, alright. Karma, it ain’t.
c) Sorry. I’m far too busy and important to search for recent threads. Besides, mine’s better.
d) Quoting the whole post for clarity? Eh, no. Unless you’re quoting three sentences or less, how hard is it to incorporate the salient points into your reply? I understand there are exceptions to every rule.
Yes, indeed! Especially for certain slowpokes among us (ahem) who respond to a post before noticing that the thread has wandered over onto a following page. :o
Yes, keeping in mind point number one, a pithy but well-aimed dart can look like a blundering anvil of a non sequitur if one or more posts intervene during composition (and preview! And preview, oh, coding clownself!).
With a long post, it helps to quote it, then break it into chunks for each portion of one’s answer. Even then, I try to snip out as much as possible, leaving enough gist for my response to make sense. Well, as much sense as I can dredge out of the old frontal lobes, of course.
The double whammy! Quoting the entire OP and the post immediately above.
I have to believe that recent explosion of this act is related to the new format. The two “REPLY” buttons are too similar. The old “QUOTE” button inside the post was much better.
John Mace, I agree with you. The reply button located inside the post should, indeed, read ‘Quote’. The fact that it doesn’t is, indeed, a great source of confusion. I hadn’t even thought of that before I posted my rant, er, thank-you note.
I willing to cut recent offenders a little slack. I still say that sort of thing is easy to catch if you review your reply before submitting it. But as I am often guilty of not thoroughly reviewing my replies before submitting them, I can only get but so mad, er, thankful.
Hovering your pointer over the inside “Quote” button shows a tag that says “reply with quote”. Not really confusing for us unimportant, sedentary types.
I shall also explain why I use the “quote” function for 99% of the replies I write.
I am dyslexic = I read and write much slower then the average non-dyslexic poster
English is a language I didn’t leanr = adding that to my handicap,it makes me reading/writing even slower then when I am using other languages.
As such, I have also difficulties with holding what I read in every detail in my memory while trying to formulate a readable answer.
Thus having that particular post under my eyes is for me indispensable.
As others already said: sometimes a thread moves fast which results in other posts appearing between the one you reply to and your reply.
Read the above and you shall see why this happens to me frekwently.
Add to that the fact that this website can become rather slow, which adds to point 5 happening even more frekwent.
Add to points 5,6 and 7 the occasions when I copy/past to and from Word because tehre I can use spell control, which makes points 5,6 and 7 happen even more frekwent.
So when I reply to a whole post, I quote the whole post cutting it in fractions following the issues of my reply.
I’m so sorry you feel insulted by this, yet I can not change it. People already post enough threads to say I’m a completely incoherent and unreadable lunatic, whihc is taking already a lot of bandspace here… I would appreciate it if you would accept my apologies for the inconvenience of my quoting style.
Salaam. A.
I do it because I don’t approach the Dope in a task oriented way. I’m a browser. While the reply page is loading, I may be off reading other threads, or reading the news, or checking my email. By the time I make it back, minutes or hours may have passed and I know that if I don’t quote, my witty reply will prolly be several posts down from the post I’m responding to.
I daresay that I don’t think this is what the OP is complaining about. It’s the people who blindly quote the whole multi-paragraph OP in the first response just to add a one line comment. Throws off the whole thread.