FAQ: The Art of Quoting in Posts

Discussion in 'FAQs' started by LowWaterMark, Aug 15, 2003.

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  1. LowWaterMark

    LowWaterMark Administrator

    Joined:
    Aug 10, 2002
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    When you need to be very clear about which text you are replying to when making a post in an ongoing thread, it's a good idea to quote a portion of that text within the body of your reply.

    This forum software provides a tool for quoting text and it's based upon the use of "quote tags". Quote tags look like this (except I've added an extra * character here to make them visible, otherwise they would create a real quote box, which I don't want in this case):

    [quote*] some quoted text goes here... [/quote*]

    If you remove the "*" characters from the above, and put this into a reply message, you'll end up with the quoted text showing in a highlighted quote box.

    Now, you can manually enter "quote tags" as shown above, and copy and paste specific text from someone else's post, or you can have the board software fill-in (to a reply window) the entire contents of some post for you using the "quote" button that appears in the upper right corner of every post here on the forum.

    Here's a set of screen shots showing the automated quoting process.

    While reading a thread, you find a post that you want to reply to, so you press the "quote" button that sits within the upper right corner of that post...

    [​IMG]

    This will bring up a normal "Post Reply" window, except that the entire contents of the quoted post will be contained in the Message box area inside a set of quote tags.

    [​IMG]

    Now, there are a couple of important points here. Generally, you don't want to leave the entire contents of someone's post inside yours. Usually, it is only some of the text you are commenting on, so, the right thing to do is to trim out of the quote area any text you don't care about, leaving just the text you are going to discuss in your post.

    The second thing is to remember to place all of your comments below and outside of the closing quote tag. If you put your text before the ending quote tag, it'll get mixed up inside the quote box and be hard to read.

    [​IMG]

    When you've formatted your post, you can Preview it to see if the quote box(es) are correct. Notice how the new text I've entered appears outside the quote box...

    [​IMG]

    That is basically how quoting works within the vBulletin forum software that Wilders is running. A last point is that you can put multiple quote boxes within a reply. But, remember this key thing, for every opening quote tag you enter, ( this, without the * chr: [quote*] ), be sure to have a closing quote tag ( [/quote*] ) to balance it. Quote tags must be used in pairs or you'll end up with an odd looking post. ;)

    And keep your new text outside the quote tags!!
     
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