Ah, ok. I misinterpreted you; I thought you were talking about screwing things up when manually inserting nested quotes, rather than removing them.
Yeah, I’m saying that all things being equal, we’re less likely to have a higher overall volume of coding errors with automatic nested quotes (from people screwing up when removing ones they don’t want) than from manual nested quotes (at least partially because the people with the poorest grasp of board markup won’t even attempt it).
I understand. And in the short-term, I think you are correct. But I think people will quickly get used to it, and soon enough the error rate will become negligible, just as it presumably originally was.
Another important thing to note: All the people who said they didn’t like the new feature are awesome. Coincidence? I think not.
This page is turning into an unreadable messof quote sandwiches because two people don’t understand or don’t care about nested quote stripping. Some of the sandwiches are six quotes deep. I just skip over them now.
Check this out, in case you haven’t seen it.
I forgive you, but what does that modification do to fix nested quotes? Limit them to three deep, or whatever limit is desired?
I am developing a smoldering hatred for the consarned things. I want them gone altogether. No nested quotes, unless you build them yerself, dammit!!
Yes, at the suggested level it would limit them to the nesting shown in this message right here. No deeper than that, which I think maximizes both readability and relevance.
We’re voting? I vote no. Hate 'em.
I like having nested quotes because that’s what I’ve been using for about a decade now. I don’t necessarily like other people having them, though, especially those who aren’t used to editing them.
So my vote is YES for me, NO for you. Ha!
I was one of the vocal complainers about nested quoting, not as a feature but as a practice. In other words, instead of campaigning the mods to somehow change the behavior of the board software – which I wasn’t even aware was possible – I spread the gospel to everyone I was in involved conversation with to use chained quotes instead of nested quotes. My reasoning was pretty simple: nested quotes look ugly, and because the poster’s name wasn’t next to their text it was hard to tell who said what.
This was back in the day – what, five years or so? – when nested quotes were the norm, and back then I manually created all my quote boxes. (I kept doing that until bread crumbs were instituted.) Here’s a quick test: Who said what colors, at a glance?
NESTED
CHAINED
Note: I’m splitting this post into two because I don’t want my main point drowned out by my giant quotebox samples.
Chained quotes are clearly superior to nested quotes both in maintaining the conversation flow and in the clarity of attribution. I preached for this repeatedly, but back in the day I spent much more time in the Pit and GD, so I ran across nested quotes much more frequently.
I rarely venture to ATMB, so I didn’t know nested quotes might come back until yesterday when I first saw them. I didn’t have any opinion at first, but after a day of use I’m firmly in the NO camp. And now I remember all the reasons I used to hate nested quotes. Here are my reasons we should go back to quote-stripping by default:
-
Nesting by default increases bandwidth by a nontrivial amount simply by sheer apathy. People tend not to futz with coding and will simply add their contribution at the end of whatever the Quote button spits into their reply box. With all previous conversation included, I’m spitballing that at least 10% additional overhead will hit the servers going forward purely from the additional text in nested quotes that wasn’t there before. Whatever percent it actually is, this alone is compelling reason to change it back.
-
With nested quotes, it is difficult to attribute who said what. This is a huge problem if it is the default behavior.
-
Nested quotes are repetitive and boring. Why do I need to read the same text 10 times in a row? Of course I don’t, which is why quote-stripping as a default was so perfect. Especially for this board in particular, where minimalism is holy writ. Because the nested quotes are so repetitive, people tend to just skip them altogether. I already skip posts that parse replies one sentence at a time. Hell, if I see more than around three quote boxes I automatically skip the post altogether on the grounds that it is just too pedantic. (Post parsing a sentence at a time is invariably repeating the same point over and over.) Nested quotes trigger this same reaction, at least to me. Since I’m not a unique flower, I’m guessing others as well.
-
Nested quotes are ugly clutter. Just the indenting alone is bad enough, but also all the extra space for multiple quotes is ugly, too. Clutter is anathema to this board, which prides itself on not having avatars or images. Nested quotes are akin to the clutter of avatars and images.
Please, let’s go back to the better way, which is quote-stripping. That there was not much complaining about nested quotes way back when it was the default isn’t indicative of anything. We just didn’t know any better. We do now.
I don’t have a long post, I’d just like to vote in favor of nested quotes. I find they make it easier to follow the conversation.
The problem with chain quotes vs. nested is that there’s no way to distinguish between:
1.) A chain quote that indicates a linked series of replies; and
2.) A chain quote that indicates a series of thematically related posts, but not ones that were directly in response to each other or even necessarily from the same thread, that the poster wanted to reply to collectively.
I’m not nearly as sanguine about the eventual outcome. I think that a lot of posters either will (a) try to strip out unecessary quotes and fail some not insignificant percentage of the time, creating errors in formatting (and therefore apparent attribution) that will be carried forward with every subsequent quote of those posts or (b) just say “fuck it” and just leave in all nested material that goes along with what they’re actually responding to.
Indeed.
Barely tolerable alternative, IMO. Most quotes don’t need the previous message in the chain for anyone who’s read the thread to follow the discussion.
Versus what? Stripping quotes or including chain quotes? Or both?
Actually :D, I’m on the yes side, I just HATE the way vBulletin implements it.
('Specially now that I’ve figured out how to fix the damn coding! 
)
I’d really want to keep non-poster quotes at the very least. (AIUI it only requires limiting the nest depth.)
A sticky showing how to be “next poster to quote you friendly” and explaining how vBulletin orders poster vs post would be a good idea.
[noparse]
The “enter” key is your best friend if you want to leave the nest.
[/noparse]
It makes turning this mess,
into this,
[noparse]
[/noparse]
a lot easier.
Once you’ve re-associated the poster with the quote it’s pie to edit out A or C without screwing anything up, and it reads better.
(It’s also an easier way to use multi-quote to hand code a nested quote too!)
CMC fnord!
I agree that you’re second method is far preferable, but I don’t think it’s viable because it’s too complicated. And even if it weren’t, it’s still ugly, and lazy posts that just tack on to the end of whatever the quote button spits out will still waste bandwidth.