I've been finding it difficult to follow some of the threads because people are only using quotation marks to quote parts of messages they want to respond to. IMO that makes it much harder to scan a post for original text, since there's no visual differentiation.

I suggest we use this thread to discuss methods for quoting people. My proposal is to use italics, so if you were quoting me it would look like this:

I suggest we use this thread to hammer out a standard for quoting people. My proposal is to use italics, so if you were quoting me it would look like this:

Nice and easy to see what's old and what's new.

It's actually quite easy to learn the italics formatting for this board, and the preview option makes it simple to quickly check that your tags are correct. You can see all the options here.

What do you think? My hope is that at the very least people will choose something besides "blah blah" etc.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. Learn how the tags work and you can be cool like me! Now if that isn't incentive then I don't know what is.

Hey, thanks for the info, John. I had noticed that some people had quoted like this:

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I had noticed that some people had quoted like this:

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Quoting text can be done as shown above in Michael's post and that's the best way IMO since it's easier to follow the thread. I guess it's too much trouble to check out this page to see how easy it is to quote and make links?

--Dave

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I guess it's too much trouble to check out this page to see how easy it is to quote and
make links?

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Just in case you go to other web boards, most have this kind of a page. Discus is very non-standard though. Most web boards use [quote]This is a quote.[/quote] for quoting. [link]Link to a site[/link], for a link and then all the constructs are done that way... italics, images, etc. This is the only board I ever use that has that funky slashlink or slashquote with braces.

So I would recommend looking for a similar page when you post at any other board.

--Dave

My first time posting to a message board was on this site about a month ago. I didn't realize there was all kinds of formatting available. I'm gonna go read that link John posted when he started this thread just as soon as I finish this post. I guess I just judged the book by its cover when I assumed this box was just for entering plain text and links.

I think maybe people have not been using the given quote formatting because it makes the posts much more bulky.

"Quoting text can be done as shown above in Michael's post and that's the best way IMO since it's easier to follow the thread."

Of course that doesn't do anything to address my fundamental laziness. Just throwing some quotes around the text is easier... ;)

I'll admit that the quote tags make things easier to read, though.

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I think maybe people have not been using the given quote formatting because it makes the posts much more bulky.

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Alan said:

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Plus, it doesn't really indicate who made the original quote. Yes, I also agree that it's much easier to read.

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Hey, I didn't notice that quote tag. Thanks for pointing us all to it; now hopefully we'll use it as well!