After the first poster quoted the person who quoted posts 12, 17 and 42, the discussion can get pretty hard to follow. You now have to read things that were posted out of order several times.
After several iterations, it gets pretty convoluted, IMO.
Some of my thoughts, having used it for a very short time:
It’s not an option, so once you hit the quote button, everyone that responded to someone else before them shows up in the display. It can go, for instance, 10 people deep, meaning there are 10 people’s quotes in the display when you hit quote. If you just want to respond to that one person, you have to delete all the stuff that got quoted before. I’ve spent more time deleting than I would just rearranging for that rare time I would actually do a nested quote.
When the discussions get really long, you’re reading the same discussion multiple times. But the only new information is on the bottom. That can get really tedious to continually skim over all the old stuff. People just generally quote the person above them, and most people will take the path of least resistance and leave the nested quotes in place.
Since it’s against the rules here to change conversations in the quoted text, it can be like looking for a needle in a haystack to find if someone changed text 5 levels deep, in a long conversation. When you have to quote the original text, that’s less likely to happen unintentionally. Someone might not know that they’re quoting text that has been changed several levels above them if they’re not looking carefully.
ETA: It also makes conversations much longer and look much more cluttered, IMO.
It’d be nice then to have the default be to strip nested quotes and another button or toggle somewhere for quoting with nesting, but I suppose that might be much more work to rejigger the code for.
But, seriously, is it that bad to just have nested quotes by default? It’s already the case that most quotations of long posts involve some manual stripping down to the relevant portion being responded to anyway; that’s exhibited in this very thread. I think feedback from the board on one’s posting style would take care of habitual excessive quoting, just as it does for odd line breaks or overuse of colors or capitalization or what have you; it’s odd to cripple the technical functionality to enforce such an etiquette rule.
Heffalump eloquently listed all the reasons I detest nested quoting, or “quote sandwiches” as I refer to them. There can be way too much clutter if they’re left on by default. Another board I belong to switched their board foundation last year from phpBB, which had nested quoting, to vBulletin, and I was never happier.
It’s not an etiquette rule that got this crippled. It’s because it’s just usually unnecessary. Most of the time, a previous quote is necessary, and if you really need to read that, you can click the little blue button to take you back to the original post.
That said, I prefer technological solutions to just depending on everyone to do what’s right. Because, with the former, there will be no one making the mistake of quoting too many people. The latter assumes that people here care what other people here think about them, something the Pit shows is untrue. We’ve already got people who keep their manual sigs, even though people tell them that they annoy them. You’d better bet there will be people who will do it with the posts.
The whole concept of the quote button is to be a convenience. If most posts require you to delete the majority of the content, you lose the convenience.
If we want to enable this, we’ve got to make it not inconvenience those who don’t want to use it. If there was a way to push quote on each actual quote, that would work.
I even predict that the people at Giraffe, which are even less prone to editing down QUOTES than we are, will not like it eventually, too. It’s a laid back forum asking people to do a lot more work to be able to reply to someone. Either that, or they will just have really long posts after a while.
In post #11, you quoted me quoting someone else, which I did not do. True, you added a disclaimer, but I’m not sure why you did that in the first place other than to show that it could (easily) be done. Were you trying to show that default nested quotes would lead to such “mistakes”?
No, he was trying to show how easy it is to manually nest a quote. Using multiquote, you quote both posts, then copy paste the one quote to the location you want it in the other quote. He was hampered by there not being any nested quotes to work with, so created his own.
BigT said:
If you are not deleting most of the content when you quote, you are overquoting.
Can someone link to a handful of old threads where quoting got too long and out of hand? I don’t think anyone complained back then, and when nested quotes went away there was a hue and cry. Can anyone find a significant number of posters rejoicing at the end of nested quotes?
I must be missing something because the explanation behind “but it’s a PITA” and “it’ll make the board look different” sound hollow.
I have no idea what kind of board Hefalump is referring to, but I’ve never seen orgies of quote boxes here. A random asshat, maybe, but that’s not in play.
She mentions that there will be no choice but to quote entire posts—which will get to long. She says she’s have to do it because it’s against the rules to change quotes. Yet she’s obviously used to cutting quoted posts down to the relevant bit because that’s exactly what she did in her post.
The multiquote button is an imperfect solution.
The post as displayed in the thread does not tell you what post number it is quoting, you have to scan the thread for it.
The select this post does not put them in order.
The function does not work at all with non-board quotes. The prevalence of news articles alone highlights this failing.
As demonstrated by Hefalump, when someone is making a point, the predominant habit is to take a half second—a much shorter time than finding and selecting for a multiquote—to delete unnecessary parts.
We all know it’s not magical; some of us just think it’d be an improvement to bring back embedded quotes. Much easier to use, and I think generally makes the conversation easier to follow. I know some think quotes will get unneccsarily lengthy, but people here are usually pretty good at clipping irrelevant text (with some notable exceptions, of course), so I don’t see that changing if embedded quotes were restored.
I was responding to your statement that “it’s easier to remove some lines than do some careful copy&paste magic to add them” to show that no level of magic or careful copy & pasting would be involved - it was an incredibly simple 3-step process.
No. The disclaimer was put there because we’re not supposed to futz with people’s posts inside quote marks to prevent misrepresenting what they said. The disclaimer was there to say “I’m not futzing to misrepresent, I’m futzing to demonstrate how trivially easy it is to put a quote within a quote in the (inevitable) event the powers that be don’t implement nested quoting.”
I’ve noticed that when I reply to IMs on the board, it does use nested quotes, and I usually take the trouble to remove some of the extraneous quotes because, same as replying to an e-mail, in most cases it’s a waste of space and unnecessary to include every previous message. I prefer not to have to do that when replying to threads.
The best would be that vBulletin would give you an option when you’re replying to include nested quotes or not, but since we have to stick to using only one way, I prefer not having nested quotes.
I also miss default nested quotes. I miss it a lot in GD, not at all in MPSIMS, and varying amounts in other fora. If I quote a post I need the context to make sense, which often includes the piece the poster I’m replying to quoted. I think vBulletin may have made this change when they introduced automatic post linkages(the little blue arrow in each post quoted via quote or multiquote). In theory you don’t need to nest quotes because the arrows create a linkage which allows people to follow the conversation. Similarly it wouldn’t be necessary in a thread-based layout. But when you combine the complex threads which are typical in GD, the longer timeframe of the conversation, and the flat layout of the default view, it can be difficult to retain context throughout.
So I’d vote to return nested quotes as the default.
Giraffe, I’m guessing just “return;” would work just as well as “return $text;” It could depend on how it’s called, but if you’re feeling froggy, give it a shot.
No, it’s a function – the return value is what is displayed in the quote box.
As for the issues regarding clutter of multiple layers of nested quotes – it was never really a problem back when it was the default. Just like most people are savvy enough to edit down a quote to only reply to the relevant part, I think most people are savvy enough to cut out unnecessary layers of quoting.
The reason I like the feature is that since the default was changed to no nested quotes, you end up with people commenting on other people’s arguments without context, e.g.
What statement is poster A disagreeing with? Now I have to scroll all the way back up, giving myself crippling carpal tunnel syndrome.
Or wait, does Rule 34 now include GD? Yich.
I think at least five of our forums really lend themselves to nested quotes. GD, GQ, the Pit, Games, and the Politics forums all have heavy interaction and interplay between posters. The reasons vary for some (e.g., GD and the Game Room) and overlap for others (GD and Politics 2010), but the bulk of interactions depend on clarity and context for ease of following.
That wasn’t an empty challenge above–I really could have missed or glossed over complaints about out of control threads being over-quoted or posters announcing how much the board improved when nested quotes first disappeared. All I remember was much easier posting and lots of complaining.
I just want to make one distinction. It’s much easier to strip out unnecessary parts of the text (which is all that gets displayed now) without messing up the coding than to cut out parts of other people’s nested quotes when coding is involved.
When you do, you have to remember that the first person’s tag is associated with the last comment. That’s not intuitive, so there may be some people who strip out everything except the last person’s tag and the last bit of text. That would attribute the wrong information to the wrong person. Very easy to do accidentally.
Just to save you from further crippling injury, since you’re the only user that I’ve seen who manually types their own quote tags instead of using the computer-generated ones within the software, as long as you’re not quoting yourself, there’s a pretty easy solution.
In the corner of the quote of poster A, just click on the white arrow in the blue square next to poster A’s username, that will take you right to poster A’s post that has the post that poster A is responding to, even if it’s 10 pages back, without any scrolling at all. You might also want to click on the multi-quote button for that post at that time since you’ll probably be replying to it. Then it will show up in your reply box, and you can reply to it directly. You can always choose to delete it if you choose not to respond to it later.
You’ll want to consult your doctor, but I’ve heard they sometimes prescribe splints that may help with carpal tunnel, as well as medication and therapy. Good luck!
I don’t see anything that happened. Are you referring to the fact that I trimmed Rhythmdvl’s post down?