Using the Quote Function

[tree68]

Paul of Covington

I wonder if some of the problems people are having might stem from the particular devices they're using.

That is mentioned from time to time, especially folks using a smart phone.

[Paul of Covington]

   I wonder if some of the problems people are having might stem from the particular devices they're using.   I use a desktop with W10 and Edge, and don't seem to have any serious problems, but maybe if you're using a tablet or smart phone, the small screen may make it hard to see the whole picture.

[tree68]

There are two ways that people usually quote - I'll simply summarize.

First one clicks on the reply button.  That opens up the window for a reply.

If someone is doing a completely separate post without quoting, they just type their reply in the composition window and hit submit.

If they are going to quote the entire post that they are replying to, they simply click on "Add Quote to your Post" and the entire post being replied to will be shown as a quote.  Add or subtract at will (only need to click on that once).

If there is only one sentence, section, or even phrase one wants to quote, then open the reply composition box, highlight the text wanted in the quote (as has been noted, just drag the cursor over said text), then click on "Add Quote to your Reply" and only the highlighted text will show up as a quote.

This can be done multiple times, as has been noted.

I rarely use nested quotes.  If I did, I would expect to see multiple quote tags, or I'd add them, carefully matching beginning and end tags.  On the rare occasion I want to quote several people in the same post, I'll use the "long form" quote tag, which includes the original poster's name.

[Mookie]

Semper Vaporo

I clicked Reply on your posting, then I highlighted the entire content of your posting... then I clicked the magnifying glass to see what I would get... Hmmm... NOTHING showed up

You magnify AFTER you quote and reply.  It is the final step before hitting submit your reply

[Mookie]

Semper Vaporo

I did EXACTLY as you instructed... I clicked Reply on your posting, then I highlighted the entire content of your posting... then I clicked the magnifying glass to see what I would get... Hmmm... NOTHING showed up in the preview!  And there is nothing in this edit box as I type this. I realize I am nitpicking, but there are those that use the internet that do not have any idea how to do this stuff beyond the very basics.  If you leave out some seeming obvious (to most of us) step, then they get very confused.  They follow the instructions to the letter and it wor't work as stated.  That silly little step is not so silly and not at all little when you don't know it needs to be done.

  I did exactly what I do each time.  I captured your whole quote.  I agree, I am very puter illiterate, but I have been able to reply to each example w/o holding my tongue a certain way, going into a toolbox somewhere on the forum, deleting or reshaping pages.  Maybe - just maybe - simple works best? 

[BaltACD]

Under ALL circumstance - Identify the LAST [ /quote ]  in the item that you want quoted - THEN create your post AFTER that LAST [ /quote ].

[Semper Vaporo]

I did EXACTLY as you instructed... I clicked Reply on your posting, then I highlighted the entire content of your posting... then I clicked the magnifying glass to see what I would get... Hmmm... NOTHING showed up in the preview!  And there is nothing in this edit box as I type this.

I realize I am nitpicking, but there are those that use the internet that do not have any idea how to do this stuff beyond the very basics.  If you leave out some seeming obvious (to most of us) step, then they get very confused.  They follow the instructions to the letter and it wor't work as stated.  That silly little step is not so silly and not at all little when you don't know it needs to be done.

[Murphy Siding]

Mookie

I agree that I am not quoting 4-5 people in one posting.  I am only doing a single quote.  But for the ones of us that usually lose interest in a posting after a few comments, this works great.  

 

What about those of us that lose track in a posting after a few comments? 

[Murphy Siding]

Semper Vaporo

First you click the mouse (and hold the mouse button down) at the beginning of what you want to quote in your reply, and move the mouse to the end of what you want to quote and then let up on the button (i.e.: you Hightlight it).

      I got it to work in your order, but not in Mookie's order. Maybe she's doing it left-handed?

      Mookie- thanks for the tip about the magnifying glass feature. That's going to save me a lot of time.

      If I wanted to quote only part of a post, I would  hit the add Quote to your Post button, and then go through and delete all the parts I didn't want to quote. This confirms that I am a technology dinosaur.

[Mookie]

I agree that I am not quoting 4-5 people in one posting.  I am only doing a single quote.  But for the ones of us that usually lose interest in a posting after a few comments, this works great.  

[Mookie]

Actually, I hit reply to post first.  Then hold down left button and highlight what I want to quote.  

Semper Vaporo

First you click the mouse (and hold the mouse button down) at the beginning of what you want to quote in your reply,

as I did here.  Then I go up to the magnifier and check the looks and spelling in the new post.  Next step is to hit submit reply.  

[zugmann]

A Magic Pixie

This is an experiment. The above quote is of Tree68 replying to me by quoting me. I made this test by selecting a part of his complete comment in his orginal post. So this is a partial selection of his post, not the entire text. You can see that when selecting my quote together with his reply to it, it comes through combined so that it appears as one quote by Tree rather than a statement by me and a reply by Tree. At first, I had this happen when I made an above post of the same quote. But I saw that it was setting up wrongly, so I quoted his entire text of the post as the quote, and they went back and deleted all but the part I wanted to keep. That correctly separated my comment from his reply. But you can see that there is still a formatting issue as Overmod pointed out.

 

You still have to pay attention to formatting.

[Semper Vaporo]

Murphy Siding

I'm confused. I just click on add quote, highlight what I want to quote and then start writing after the 2nd quote indicator. Then I do a post preview and if it looks ok - post it. Are we on the same page?

Mookie... I think it has to do with the order of the instructions in your post... you say you click on the button, then you say you highlight what you want to quote... that is backwards.  First you click the mouse (and hold the mouse button down) at the beginning of what you want to quote in your reply, and move the mouse to the end of what you want to quote and then let up on the button (i.e.: you Hightlight it).  Then you click the "Add Quote to your Post" button.  This then copies just the text you highlighted to the reply box with the appropriate tags to make it show as a quoted text from a post by someone else.

Also there is an overload of the use of the word Highlight... for some that means marking a section of text to be in a color other than the normal black or to make it Bold or Italic or Underlined or any combination of "other than normal".  For others it means what I described above to select a section of text by a "click and drag" of the mouse.

[Mookie]

Murphy - it is simple copy and paste.  I am not sure what all the feather flapping is about.  

[Mookie]

Murphy Siding

highlight what I want to quote

See - I did it again.  

[Murphy Siding]

Mookie

 

 

ChuckCobleigh

some folks are quite adept at this, some not so much so, but it really is pretty easy.

 

 

I'm confused.  I just click on add quote, highlight what I want to quote and then start writing after the 2nd quote indicator.  Then I do a post preview and if it looks ok - post it.  Are we on the same page?

 

Well, that depends. What page are you on? What does your comment above that I highlighted in red mean?

[Murphy Siding]

Paul of Covington

   ......I might be a little paranoid, but I always start by going to the bottom right corner and stretching the box WAY down to be sure I see it all.

 

   Not me by gosh! I just start typing with the ol' brain on autopilot and then hit submit your post. Then, because I might be a little paranoid, I try to remember to check what I have posted. Then, I go back and fix it. It's not the best system, but it's a system.

[jeffhergert]

Paul of Covington

   I wonder if part of the problem is that the Reply box is so small.   I might be a little paranoid, but I always start by going to the bottom right corner and stretching the box WAY down to be sure I see it all.

 

You can enlarge the Reply box to full page.  The icon with the four arrows.  When you're done writing, minimize it back to normal to post.  At least I have to do that.

I discovered it by accident a while back.   

Jeff

[Lithonia Operator]

It helps, IMO, to delete from the quote everything that is not precisely what you are responding to. Now, would some say, "Hey, you are taking things out of context?" Yeah, probably. But in most cases, a lot of the context is not needed.

[Euclid]

tree68

tree68 wrote the following post 4 hours ago: EuclidBut you cannot recognize that because the quote is not shown in the composition box. If the quoted text is not visible in the composition box, highlight everything in the box (including what you can't see) and change the font and/or the color. I've had the same problem and that solution always works for me.

This is an experiment.  The above quote is of Tree68 replying to me by quoting me.  I made this test by selecting a part of his complete comment in his orginal post.  So this is a partial selection of his post, not the entire text.

You can see that when selecting my quote together with his reply to it, it comes through combined so that it appears as one quote by Tree rather than a statement by me and a reply by Tree. 

At first, I had this happen when I made an above post of the same quote.  But I saw that it was setting up wrongly, so I quoted his entire text of the post as the quote, and they went back and deleted all but the part I wanted to keep.  That correctly separated my comment from his reply.  But you can see that there is still a formatting issue as Overmod pointed out. 

[Electroliner 1935]

Paul of Covington

I might be a little paranoid, but I always start by going to the bottom right corner and stretching the box WAY down to be sure I see it all. Add Quote to your Po

+1

 

[Overmod]

And here is Sam's most recent, as I would have prepared it for quoting, similarly reformatted for 'sense' (but without doing any tinkering with the varying fonts different posters used).  Note that Sam started typing his reply within the block of text tree68 was using, so his reply did not come out separate from the inline quote even though he had a correct /quote inserted for him several lines down...

samfp1943

tree68

Murphy Siding

It took forever and a lot of coaching from other members to teach me how to quote things. I still screw up about 1 in 10 and have to go back and fix them.

That (in general - not picking on any one person) is why I posted this.  Everyone wants to make good posts - sometimes it's just a matter of not understanding how the coding works.   The blank lines are an issue in many, if not most, cases. 

I've done computer programming and written web pages.  That doesn't make me any better then anyone else - it just means I understand how it works.  Much like someone asking their mechanic neighbor how to fix something.

VERY HELPFUL, Information Thanks for posting! 

Note also that I had to manually insert the correct BBcode for the three emoticons at the end, as the forum software helpfully converted them to links.  (The sense of which escapes me...)

[Overmod]

Note that here is Euclid's previous post, edited as it 'should be' to remove the misformatting if it were to be quoted in full:

Euclid

tree68

Euclid

But you cannot recognize that because the quote is not shown in the composition box.

If the quoted text is not visible in the composition box, highlight everything in the box (including what you can't see) and change the font and/or the color.  I've had the same problem and that solution always works for me.

Regarding my comment as follows:

“But actually the cursor is parked after the first quote marker rather than after the last quote marker.  So it is parked inside of the quoted text.  But you cannot recognize that because the quote is not shown in the composition box.”

When I say the quote is not shown in the composition box, I don’t mean that it is invisible.  I mean the quote is there in the box, but it is not scrolled into position to show in the viewing window.  So if you just arrow down, it will reveal the quote by bringing it into the view window.

But the normal operation is for the system to park the quote at the top of the composition box and leave your cursor sitting below that quote and ready for your response.  

In the malfunction that I am talking about, the system parks the quote below the viewing window of the composition box, and only leaves the word “quote” visible as an indicator that your quote has been place. 

The fact that the quote is not actually visible should signal that something is wrong, but a person can overlook that because they see the word “quote” indicating that the quote has been placed.  But the word “quote” that they see is the quote start marker; whereas they assume that it is the end marker, which would be normal operation.

So then a person just starts writing their text, thinking they are below the quote (as they type below a “quote” marker), but they are actually typing below the top quote marker instead of the bottom quote marker.  And because they don’t see the actual quote text, they don’t realize that they are adding their message to appear as being a part of the quote.

This problem would be easy to overcome if a person just scrolled the post composition box to make sure they know where the quote text is hiding.  But that should not be necessary if the quote function were working normally.  When it is, the quote is plainly displayed automatically in the text composition box.  But when that does not happen, it becomes a natural trap to cause a person to inadvertently add their text to the quote instead of posting their message independent of the quote. 

As I mentioned, this seems to be a random malfunction of the system software.  I think it began generally, approximately 4-5 months ago.  Perhaps it corresponds to a significant number of changes that seem to have been made starting about that same time.  I don’t recall this quote problem ever happening prior to that time.

I have not seen the problem you are referring to where the text is actually invisible such as typing and seeing nothing show.  But I have had some other variations of quote problems.  Generally, they result in quoted text showing, but without the identification of the author.  But these things get very complicated to even observe and document in their full detail.

In order to get the nesting to work correctly, I had to delete exactly three 'spaces' between the end of each tag and the beginning of the 'nested' entry underneath.  Fewer and there remained too much space; more, and the nesting is destroyed (with all the text running together in the "quoted" box).

Finicky experimentation, and liberal use of the 'undo' function as soon as a problem is noted, are necessary.

[Overmod]

Something else that I noticed starting at about the same time, a few months ago, was a change in formatting 'nested' quotes in the text that is pasted in using the 'quote' function.  This may be related to the quirk which fails to render 'smiley' emoticons correctly in quoted text.

In BBcode, nested quotes are each delimited by quote and /quote tags, but the 'streamlined' version simply uses fixed indent ... the problem being that attempting to type text in the 'indented' sections screws up the autoformatting that renders them as nested. 

Where this becomes a specific issue for me is that, when I quote a whole section or prior post, I carefully remove all the excess space and lines that the forum software worthlessly injects.  If I delete one too many spaces toward the indented part, the indent formatting becomes lost and I have to use the 'undo' function to get back and try again.  On a phone, where there is no 'forward delete' key and the formatting is, to put things bluntly, primitive, it can be tedious at best to edit quote layout coherently, but I think it is still well worthwhile to try.

The alternative is to go in and insert quote and /quote tags manually for the "indented" sections (and, not incidentally, 'snip' the quoted sections for best context) to get things to read correctly.  That may mean repeated use of the 'edit' function to get things to read coherently or as intended.  Note that there is special syntax involved in getting the "author" to display; not everyone here has realized that any text can be typed in, not just a username or 'handle'. 

[samfp1943]

tree68

 

 

Murphy Siding

It took forever and a lot of coaching from other members to teach me how to quote things. I still screw up about 1 in 10 and have to go back and fix them.

 

 

That (in general - not picking on any one person) is why I posted this.  Everyone wants to make good posts - sometimes it's just a matter of not understanding how the coding works.   The blank lines are an issue in many, if not most, cases. 

I've done computer programming and written web pages.  That doesn't make me any better then anyone else - it just means I understand how it works.  Much like someone asking their mechanic neighbor how to fix something.

VERY HELPFUL, Information,  !  Thanks for posting! 

 

[Euclid]

tree68

 

Euclid

But you cannot recognize that because the quote is not shown in the composition box.

 

 

If the quoted text is not visible in the composition box, highlight everything in the box (including what you can't see) and change the font and/or the color.  I've had the same problem and that solution always works for me.

 

 

 

Regarding my comment as follows:

“But actually the cursor is parked after the first quote marker rather than after the last quote marker.  So it is parked inside of the quoted text.  But you cannot recognize that because the quote is not shown in the composition box.”

When I say the quote is not shown in the composition box, I don’t mean that it is invisible.  I mean the quote is there in the box, but it is not scrolled into position to show in the viewing window.  So if you just arrow down, it will reveal the quote by bringing it into the view window.

But the normal operation is for the system to park the quote at the top of the composition box and leave your cursor sitting below that quote and ready for your response.  

In the malfunction that I am talking about, the system parks the quote below the viewing window of the composition box, and only leaves the word “quote” visible as an indicator that your quote has been place. 

The fact that the quote is not actually visible should signal that something is wrong, but a person can overlook that because they see the word “quote” indicating that the quote has been placed.  But the word “quote” that they see is the quote start marker; whereas they assume that it is the end marker, which would be normal operation.

So then a person just starts writing their text, thinking they are below the quote (as they type below a “quote” marker), but they are actually typing below the top quote marker instead of the bottom quote marker.  And because they don’t see the actual quote text, they don’t realize that they are adding their message to appear as being a part of the quote.

This problem would be easy to overcome if a person just scrolled the post composition box to make sure they know where the quote text is hiding.  But that should not be necessary if the quote function were working normally.  When it is, the quote is plainly displayed automatically in the text composition box.  But when that does not happen, it becomes a natural trap to cause a person to inadvertently add their text to the quote instead of posting their message independent of the quote. 

As I mentioned, this seems to be a random malfunction of the system software.  I think it began generally, approximately 4-5 months ago.  Perhaps it corresponds to a significant number of changes that seem to have been made starting about that same time.  I don’t recall this quote problem ever happening prior to that time.

I have not seen the problem you are referring to where the text is actually invisible such as typing and seeing nothing show.  But I have had some other variations of quote problems.  Generally, they result in quoted text showing, but without the identification of the author.  But these things get very complicated to even observe and document in their full detail. 

[tree68]

Murphy Siding

It took forever and a lot of coaching from other members to teach me how to quote things. I still screw up about 1 in 10 and have to go back and fix them.

That (in general - not picking on any one person) is why I posted this.  Everyone wants to make good posts - sometimes it's just a matter of not understanding how the coding works.   The blank lines are an issue in many, if not most, cases. 

I've done computer programming and written web pages.  That doesn't make me any better then anyone else - it just means I understand how it works.  Much like someone asking their mechanic neighbor how to fix something.

[tree68]

Euclid

But you cannot recognize that because the quote is not shown in the composition box.

If the quoted text is not visible in the composition box, highlight everything in the box (including what you can't see) and change the font and/or the color.  I've had the same problem and that solution always works for me.

So I conclude that this quote behavior is due to the system radomly misplacing the cursor when quoted material appears in the post compostion box.

Could be - I think there's a hiccup in the forum software that turns portions of the text into unreadable characters.  I've had a similar phenomenon without including a quote - nothing I type shows up in the composition box.  So I keep typing, highlight it all, and make my usual changes in typeface and color.  Voila!  My entry appears!  Then I get to fix my typos...

[K. P. Harrier]

It is unclear what the problem is.  But, I suspect it is quoting out of thin air.

Let’s say a thread has 20 posts, and the post you want to quote is post No. 13.  Press REPLY FROM THAT 13TH POST, not just a new one anywhere else.  That should solve the problem.