Ok people, here's how quoting works

[Jason Dunn]

After manually correcting the 100th broken quote today (including ones by my own team), I thought perhaps I should explain how it works so you can fix them yourselves. <img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif" /> There are two elements to the quote: the start tag and the end tag. These are inserted automatically, but it seems that when people are editing their message they are getting "broken". The start tag will look like this (I added a space after the [ so the code wouldn't work, you'd delete that space): [ quote="dwprice"] - notice that there needs to be quotes around the username that you're referencing. The end tag is equally simple: [/quote]. The problems I'm seeing most often are people missing a " after or before the user name, and a missing [ at the end. I hope this helps clear things up for everyone!

[Steven Cedrone]

You can also take advantage of the "preview" button before you submit your post. :wink:

[butch]

You can also take advantage of the "preview" button before you submit your post. :wink:

And the Edit one after!!!

[MobiliT]

Can I quote you all on that? :lol:

[Ed Hansberry]

[quote="Jason Dunn" After manually correcting the 100th broken quote today (including ones by my own team), I thought perhaps I should explain how it works so you can fix them yourselves.[/quote]

Thanks. Seems so simple after you explain it like that.
:rofl:

[topps]

After manually correcting the 100th broken quote today

For those (many but decreasing proportion) of us who dabbled in HTML etc, this is fairly obvious...but I suspect that there is an increasing number of people who are not familiar with HTML coding but are familiar with email quoting, where it doesn't matter where you truncate the quoted material.

I think that your appeal will likely fall on deaf ears. Is there not some way you can show quoted material, maybe in bold, but hide the quote codes so that we can't accidentally delete them. Probably this will create some limitation for power users who are familiar with how to use the current system but maybe you can provide an advanced mode for them. For the rest, hide the quotes codes.

The alternative for many people is to get lazy...ie don't edit out the quoted material but simply quote it in its entirety - with long threads, this also creates problems.

[Pony99CA]

For those (many but decreasing proportion) of us who dabbled in HTML etc, this is fairly obvious...but I suspect that there is an increasing number of people who are not familiar with HTML coding but are familiar with email quoting, where it doesn't matter where you truncate the quoted material.

The problem is that it's not quite like HTML. Besides the tag delimiters being different ("[" and "]" vs. "&lt;" and ">"), the attribute mechanism is different. You use:


quote="username"


instead of something like


quote user="username"


Yes, it's simpler, but HTML people may get surprised by it, too.

I think that your appeal will likely fall on deaf ears. Is there not some way you can show quoted material, maybe in bold, but hide the quote codes so that we can't accidentally delete them. Probably this will create some limitation for power users who are familiar with how to use the current system but maybe you can provide an advanced mode for them. For the rest, hide the quotes codes.

Please only do this if there is an override you can set in your user profile. New accounts would have the "newbie" mode on, but I'd like to turn the advanced user mode on once, and never worry about it again.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

There are two elements to the quote: the start tag and the end tag. These are inserted automatically, but it seems that when people are editing their message they are getting "broken". The start tag will look like this (I added a space after the [ so the code wouldn't work, you'd delete that space): [ quote="dwprice"] - notice that there needs to be quotes around the username that you're referencing.

Actually, you didn't need to add the space and then explain that the space shouldn't be there. You should have either just clicked the "Disable BBCode in this post" checkbox, which would display the BBCode in the text, or used the Code tag, which would display the BBCode in a special box.

The problem with simply disabling BBCode is that anybody quoting your post would reenable the BBCode, and the tags would take effect, but your original post would still be OK. (In fact, during preview mode, the above quotation got messed up because you used "[ /quote]" without the space, which ended the text I was quoting. I had to remove some of the material I was quoting.)

See my next two posts for examples.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

Here is the correct way to quote text:


Username's quoted text.


Voila!

Steve

[Pony99CA]

If you want to display some BBCode in your posts while still having it take effect in other places, use the Code tag.

Here is some bold text.

Here is a quotation:


The truth is a precious commodity. That's why I use it so sparingly.

Here is some BBCode that doesn't take effect:


[quote="Mark Twain"]
The truth is a precious commodity. That's why I use it so sparingly.
[/quote]


My bill for consulting services is in the mail. :lol:

Steve

[Jason Dunn]

Actually, you didn't need to add the space and then explain that the space shouldn't be there. You should have either just clicked the "Disable BBCode in this post" checkbox, which would display the BBCode in the text, or used the Code tag, which would display the BBCode in a special box.

The problem is that our front page doesn't support fully support bbCode or all the phpBB functions (including the excludes) - so I wasn't sure how it would react. :-) But for strict forum posts, you're absolutely correct.

[Pony99CA]

The problem is that our front page doesn't support fully support bbCode or all the phpBB functions (including the excludes) - so I wasn't sure how it would react. :-) But for strict forum posts, you're absolutely correct.

Ah, right, the front page. Well, at least I got to boost my post count. :lol:

Steve