Like next to the report button, basically every forum except this one has one. It’s really annoying to have to copy and paste and then code the quote, plus it doesn’t even say who wrote the original post when you just code it.
The lack of a quote button is intentional. Two main reasons for that… First, I have seen that most forums that have this feature often have a lot of redundant junk in their threads from someone quoting 5 paragraphs and adding a line or two of their own. That’s very annoying and makes the thread hard to read.
Second, quoting is often used by posters who want to dissect another member’s post line-by-line and refute each point. We do not want to encourage such posts, as they tend to become one-on-one debates that add little to the community.
I know its probably illegal to necro-post, but I didn’t want to start a whole new thread, and the searches for quote buttons reached me here.
Roger_Dooley, couldn’t the reverse be argued that the quote button allows one to segregate questions from someone’s post and address them each very specifically, thus allowing a better question-answer response?
Also, for the first point, most threads are already hard to read because we can’t identify what parts of a post someone is addressing or precisely which part. We can scroll up and down reading the posts, or go back and forth over pages to re-read the posts, but that becomes irksome and slows us down a lot.
I can understand the desire to keep the forum freer of clutter though, so could we maybe have a compromise of a limited quote button or something along those lines? For example, maybe people can only have a limit of 5 quotes per day or a number based on their quote count. That way, people can’t just spam the quotes and have to use them smartly. In addition, the quote could have an auto-clip function that deletes extraneous text that’s been double or triple-quoted or be limited to a certain number of characters.
These are just my on the fly ideas; I’m sure other forumers can come up with a more efficient alternative.
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aonoshonen, you make a good point. Everything has tradeoffs, and in forums where it’s simple to push a button to quote an entire post I’ve almost always seen massive thread pollution involving repetition and duplication of the same content. Our hope is that members who want to reply to very specific lines can do so easily (as I just did) but that wholesale copying won’t be encouraged.