When I click on the Quote button in the bottom right to see how the poster constructed this none of the nested quotes appear, just the most recent contribution. Can some kind soul please explain the process for us dummies? Inquiring minds and all that, several of us are curious. Thanks!
The nested quotes worked fine. What people fucked up was when they wanted to delete the nested quote, and took part of the original quote’s tag with it.
It’s an ancient sacred mystic cryptic secret, known only to the Mages, passed on orally from elder Mage to novice Mage through the generations, forbidden to the Unwashed Masses. But if you and your spawn be members of the SDMB community of steadfast resolve and unassailable mettle, even unto the seventh generation, then your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddopers may, Mods willing, be granted the magic knowledge of the Masters. Wait for it.
Okay, lieu, may the gods and ogs and dogs of the SDMB strike me senseless, I’ll break the spell and divulge the ancient wisdom of our ancestors:
You have to type in you own quote tags (or, more to the point, do some cut-and-pasting of the originals). The pattern must end up looking like:
[noparse]
[QUOTE=Poster #1]
stuff, stuff, stuff . . .
[QUOTE=Poster #2]
more stuff, more stuff, more stuff . . .
[QUOTE=Poster #3]
still more stuff and more and more . . .
[/QUOTE]
. . . the rest of Poster #2 stuff here if any . . .
[/QUOTE]
. . . the rest of Poster #1 stuff here if any . . .
[/QUOTE]
[/noparse]
This produces a result like this:
[QUOTE=Poster #1]
stuff, stuff, stuff . . .
[QUOTE=Poster #2]
more stuff, more stuff, more stuff . . .
[QUOTE=Poster #3]
still more stuff and more and more . . .
[/QUOTE]
. . . the rest of Poster #2 stuff here if any . . .
[/QUOTE]
. . . the rest of Poster #1 stuff here if any . . .
[/QUOTE]
Note that you cannot actually see all those quotes segments at once when you click on the Quote button in any one post. What you need to do is:
[ul][li] Open a plain-text editor in a separate window.[/li][li] Go to each post you want to quote, one at a time.[/li][li] In each of those posts, click the Quote button.[/li][li] Cut and paste the parts you want to quote into the editor window, being careful to keep the Quote tags intact.[/li][li] As you cut-and-paste pieces of the several original posts into your window (keeping the Quote tags intact), be sure to arrange them nested properly as in the sample template shown here.[/li][li] Finally, open a brand new post, then cut-and-paste your entire collected multi-level quote into that. (You could open this new post first and then construct your entire post here to begin with, but that seems messier to me. YMMV.)[/li][/ul]
ETA: And, BTW, the word QUOTE in those quote tags doesn’t have to be in capital letters. [noparse]
[li] Go to each post you want to quote, one at a time.[/li][li] In each of those posts, click the Quote button.[/li][/QUOTE]
Wouldn’t it be faster to use the multi-quote function as simster notes earlier in the thread?
The multi-quote function is the icon with the " next to the quote button. If you hit that for every post you want to quote, then hit quote on your last one, you’ll get a bunch of quotes lined up. You would still have to follow the rest of the steps in your list, but you don’t really need a separate window to cut and paste.
Quite possibly. However, I have never been able to get Multi-Quote to work on my mochine. I am using an old version of Firefox with and old version of Linux, and I keep JavaScript disabled most of the time. A lot of features don’t work without JS. But I’ve tried multi-quote with and without JS, and it just doesn’t work.
Right next to this machine I have an old Win XP machine, with both IE and some not-quite-so-old version of Firefox. I was able to get multi-quote to work there, but I rarely use that mochine any more, and I’ve forgotten which browser I used and whether I had JS enabled or not.
Actually a lot of us figured them out and used them just fine. It was a few idiots who kept messing them up (and couldn’t be arsed to preview) that ruined it for the rest of us.
Second sentence: Answered as to general.
First sentence: Not. Pain in the neck, but I gave up finding out why, and either cite the guy by name, in bold, and and type plain old quote marks (you know, like in normal writing), and cut and paste, or bold face the citee and set up a quote box and put it in there.
Using the quote box by hand I never figured out how to create that cite-number-jump back thingie, which would probably be above and beyond to create by hand anyway. So I just cite the post number to make things clearer for a complicated non-linear thread.
And posters think outside the line a lot.
Occasionally you see “quoth”; it’s one poster’s mysterious calling card, as far as I can tell.
On another UBB board, we easily got up to 8 nested quotes. Generally, we’d only do it that far because one member hated nested quotes, and we occasionally enjoyed making his head explode.