some posts in general dont have the quote button on them.... yet others do.  whats the deal?

btw, havent checked this out in the rest of the board, but Mario86 has already said something to the same effect in another topic (also in General), so i know its not just one thing.

The last post I agree with, but not being able to quote the one above that would be annoying. If the last post is not directly responding to the post you want to quote then it looks like your posting to yourself.

In actual fact it happened to me just now, I wanted to quote Sean (penultimate post) but couldnt.

The answer (and it's very obvious...):
You shouldn't be quoting if you're responding to something directly before you.

The 1st purpose of quoting is to provide context. Something immediately before you is already in context. When you're talking to someone IRL and they say "Hi Clark. What did you have for lunch?", you say "Hey. I had pizza". You don't say "Hey. You just asked me what I had for lunch. I had pizza." If you ignore the question for now and come back to it a minute later then you'd be justified in saying "Oh yeah, you asked me about lunch earlier. I had pizza."

You have two possible arguments against this:
1. in 4% of cases the context is on the prior page.
2. quoting is not redundant because you can eyeball it and skip it in a blink, unlike the case with the silly person speaking "You just asked me what I had for lunch", which you are forced to listen to.
Assuming 50% of posts need to respond in series, case 1 applies to 2% of posts. Small price to pay to hinder people from "accidentally" pressing the Quote button instead of Reply. As or the second case, no, you're wrong.


Now, the 2nd purpose of quoting is to respond to only specific parts of a long post, for example to break it down into segments. In intelligent forums where people discuss things with long posts and there's lots of long posts following long posts, you want to segment the quotes. You can still do this using the [ quote ] tags. This forum has too many one-liners for it to matter.


I'm not sure if I should have it last-1 or last-2. I may change it to 1 if there's demand. Usually you should be able to get away with saying "Chris, blah blah" where just the person's name suggests you're responding to their most recent post and if it's only 2 above then it should be visible on the screen already (unless it's a topic where Alvin and his Giant Signature posted in). Besides, referring to people by their name is more respectful and nicer. Quoting is for lazy people.

Make it the last post your unable to quote, and il have no quarms.

People click Quote usually because they are lazy to click Reply. They are not going to do more work just to be able to quote. Like I said, you can still type out the [ quote ] tags manually anyway if you really wanted to. The point is to deny people the option to be lazy.  

When was that?

Nothing crashed....we just ran out of bandwidth for 20 hours or so!

If the board crashed we'd like lose all our past posts or something terrible like that!

I never used to quote people but everyone else did so I copied them.

Quote:


Nice job of reading the topic.  It's amazing to see what you've observed.  Just amazing.  There might be a solution, and that'd be to send Alex pictures of your sister (Any common image format will do).
Good luck!

AlexPenev wrote on 09/17/08 at 12:51:35: