I’m sure there must be a simple explanation, but could someone enlighten me?
Where do we do this?
I have seen, I guess mostly on websites, that whenever quotes are used,they seem to be stars (*), instead of quotation marks (").
example: service is paid for.
instead of: service is “paid” for.
I thought there might be an HTML reason or something.
I don’t think people are using asterisks in place of quotation marks. I use asterisks in plain-text forums or email when I would use bold text otherwise – it’s a method to make something stand out, to enforce the words behind it. To stress them.
At least that’s how I use them.
I use *'s as kibble. They’re extremely tasty, especially if they’ve been marinated in ¤ and sprinkled with a few ¥’s.
I use either *s or ::s to enclose an action. For example:
throws cream pie at KKBattousai
::runs and hides::
Which one I use depends on whichever I feel like using at the moment.
Years ago, only plain text was available for most e-mails and message boards. Some clever people came up with a way to overcome that shortcoming.
This is bold
This is /italic/
This is underlined
These conventions are not really necessary here, since we have bold, italic and underlined, but old habits die hard.
Or are you talking about thread titles here at the SDMB? There’s a bug in the software that sometimes cuts off anything in a thread title after a quotation mark, so we use * instead.
This explains some of the thread titles like, “Whatever happened to” and it’s blank after that. There was something in quotation marks after the “to” and the software cut it off.
Didn’t somebody find a way around this once? I don’t remember. Didn’t it have something to do with Preview/Not Preview?
Anyway, I just always use asterisks in my thread titles.
Yep. When you have quotes in the thread title and you use preview the thread title gets truncated. You can avoid this either by not previewing or (better) previewing, hitting the “back” button and posting from there.
I think the boldface answer was what I was looking for. I’ve not been on the internet long enough to remember plain text e-mail and message boards, so some conventions are a little strange to me.
Thanks,
-A
Well, I use them to either emphasize:
ex. I already had ten watermelons!
or to portray an action:
ex. scampers about laughing
I do this for actions because using the :: really sucks when you are always forgetting to disable smilies.
::pouts::
See?
I’m pretty sure you can use single quotes like ‘this’, or you can do what I do, which is to use alt+0147 and alt+0148 like “this”.