People should not quote the entire post when replying.

mathepac

Registered User
Messages
8,440
The practice of quoting preceding posts in full when replying is still commonplace, and, from my observations, it doesn’t seem to get corrected or even commented on. It can render threads unnavigable in my experience, and long-term posters are as guilty here as newcomers.

I have no idea what XenForo does when storing the original posts or when they get duplicated, but a suggestion is to display only the link back to the original post, which the reader can follow should they wish. Storing duplicated posts in full must create significant overhead for the site and the supporting tech.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

This does my head in as well but it's like trying to push back the tide. I gave up on it a long time ago.

Would you suggest that whenever anyone quotes a full post, we should just deleted and say "read the Posting Guidelines" ?
 
The problem is that it's not intuitive.

To reply, all you have to do is start typing like this in a new box. But people see and then hit the Reply button.

I will see if I can change it to "Reply quoting entire post".

Ah, maybe I will just delete the Reply button!
 
So if we delete the Quote and Reply button, then it forces people who want to quote a bit of the post to select that bit.
Definitely do this. Quoting an entire post rarely serves any purpose, and is would still be possible if absolutely necessary. Quoting one sentence, or part of one gives context and focus to the reply. Just tried it on my phone and there were no issues.
 
OK, we will try this out.

If people are having great difficult on their phones we will reconsider.

I don't have the knack of quoting on my phone either.
 
The reply / quote feature meant that the person you replied to was auto tagged and notified.

Unless someone manually tags the other user, that will be lost if they just copy paste a line from the post.
 
OK, we will try this out.

If people are having great difficult on their phones we will reconsider.

I don't have the knack of quoting on my phone either.
I don’t follow this rule because I dont understand it. What’s the difference between reply and quote.

I did this by hitting reply.

How would it be different from using quote.
 
The quote button is gone now.

But it added the whole post to a clipboard. Then you could quote another post or section of one. So you could reply to a few different posts.

It was more confusing than anything else.

Brendan
 
The reply / quote feature meant that the person you replied to was auto tagged and notified.

Unless someone manually tags the other user, that will be lost if they just copy paste a line from the post.

Good point. But I think that the confusion outweighs it. We will get rid of it temporarily and see if how it works out.
 
We have got rid of both buttons now



People will object but to the change. But it will be easy enough to get used to. Just highlight the bit you want and hit the reply button
 
Works well enough.

Can't say I had a problem with full posts quoting..This forum (aam) doesn't really suffer from people posting very long posts.