BOO! HISS!
Hello, it is me, DMark, the OP.
I am not quite sure why this thread was moved here…actually, I was looking more for an answer like, “We’ve been bolding names since 1999 when a drunk poster bolded all of his threads and we just started bolding his name as a joke and the habit caught on.”
I was, and am, fully aware it is not mandatory to bold a name. But as mentioned, I think it is a nice way to pay respect to someone you are quoting or referring to in a thread. I have continued the habit of bolding names on other boards and will be interested to see if it catches on there as well.
Was just wondering how it came to be the norm. I thought maybe there was some sort of an SDMB lore story or something.
Certainly someone remembers how and when bolding names in threads started? Isn’t there an official keeper of SDMB folklore on the staff?
I remember early on that I first started noticing people doing it - that would probably have been back in 1999 or 2000. I don’t think it was always the custom.
I don’t remember a time when there wasn’t a quote function though - didn’t ubb always have that function?
I really don’t think so. I recall otherwise.
We did go through an upgrade from one version of ubb to another (which changed & disrupted lots of things, especially in retrospect: really old posts from the earliest ubb era don’t show posters’ names under vB, later ubb-era posts, however, do).
There weren’t any formatting buttons to speak of either, or if there were they were far fewer in number and scope. You’d hit “Reply” and get a blank box to type in. If you wanted something italic you manually typed the startcode and endcode for italics yourself and so on.
(I suppose it’s possible that it was me & my browser in conjunction wtih early ubb and not just ubb unto itself, but that’s definitely how I remember it).
The problem with that has been pointed out earlier: lots of posters here have usernames which are common words and phrases, are not capitalized or are numbers. These are sometimes difficult to pick out in text; bolding the names solves that problem nicely. It could be worse; the custom could have been to bold the names in red, blinking text with a double underline and bracketed by smilies.
I think that UBB always had a quote function; what it (and early versions of vB) lacked was a button for it. In fact, earlier versions actually had more features, not less, in that it used to be possible to use any HTML code at all (this is probably still an option, but it’s so easy to mis-use, accidentally or deliberately, that I don’t think anyone allows it any more).
And I don’t remember bolding always being the norm, here… I seem to recall a thread once upon a time where someone explained it was their habit, and it just sort of caught on. But then, maybe it just took me a while to notice it.
I didn’t mean it didn’t have a quote FUNCTION; it certainly did, but you had to type in the QUOTE and /QUOTE tags yourself. As you said, there were no buttons. Certainly there were no buttons that would auto-quote the specific post you wanted to reply to.
…and some are not. Why?
If the circle beside someone’s name is green, it means they’re currently online.
Because it is a question About This Message Board. ATMB, like CS, is a forum defined by subject matter, not by type of discussion.
FWIW, I think it has always been this way. At least, I don’t remember it starting, so I think it predated my lurking then joining.
Having the user’s names in bold is useful and courteous. Works for me.
Yes, but once it’s been bolded the first time I would think that context would generally suffice for the rest of a post.
Unfortunately, a brief review throws my posted theory into discredit as Cecil himself does not seem to use the style of bolding names at all in his columns. Online, anyway.
There was a time when we could do nested quotes. If you quoted Poster B, who had himself quoted Poster A, B’s post would be quoted within A’s. Then Poster D could quote you, and your post would be nested within B’s quote, which would be within A’s, and so forth.
I was rather sorry when that was discontinued. You didn’t have to retain the nested quotes, but it was helpful if you were refuting B’s refutation of A.
A previous thread on the subject. Still no answer there, though.
You can still do that, but you have to do it manually.
I do it all the time. The old-fashioned-way of course.
Are you saying there was a time when the buttons would auto-quote posts that already had quotes in them, and do it correctly? I don’t recall that at all.
Style in newspaper and magazine gossip columns, you mean? It’s not a common style for general news articles.
Now that I think on it a bit, maybe I do remember the quotebutton working that way once upon a time… I’ve always done a lot of my message-quoting manually (easier if you only want to quote a fragment of a long post) so I probably didn’t use it much, but I vaguely remember that maybe it worked that way, after all…
We did have nested quotes for a while. IIRC, it was an add-on, not part of vB, and with one of the new releases, it just wasn’t re-installed. I don’t remember any reason given for that.
Because SkipMagic made a bold move.