Why quote long posts?

[Bill Busby]

Is it me... or does it bug others when people feel/think they always have to quote long paragraphs and/or entire long posts.

This escalates to being out of hand when other members do the same thing in reply thread and it becomes a scrolling game just to get past it all.

Sorry for the micro-rant, but I just came across one after the other and I just had to say something :)

[Chris Soucy]

Hear, hear.

I think CH should do a "DVinfo Posting Etiquette" page that gets sent to every new member just before they're made "live".

Either that or a "Breaking Etiquette" button you can click on when someones losing the plot and quoting everything in sight for no other reason than they think it looks (insert appropriate description here).

That said, in most cases, a gentle reminder to the person responsible usually (not always) seems to reign them in.

Whilst on the subject of buttons, any chance of one that says

"Please contact Admin and update your address details with at least a city. Pretty please".

I cannot believe how many people here seem to be of "no fixed abode".


CS

[Chris Barcellos]

Originally Posted by Bill Busby

This escalates to being out of hand when other members do the same thing in reply thread and it becomes a scrolling game just to get past it all.

Sometimes it is necessary to quote a prior post, so the current post makes sense. Other wise, readers are constantly scrolling back to try to match the post.

[Chris Hurd]

There's right ways and wrong ways to quote.

Right: quoting a post which is *not* immediately preceding yours but is farther back in the thread.

Wrong: quoting the post that immediately preceded yours. That's just useless clutter.

Right: selectively quoting only the relevant portion of an otherwise long post.

Wrong: quoting an entire lengthy post just to address a small part of it... or
worse, just to say "I agree." That doesn't add anything to the conversation.

Part of the problem is my fault for not swapping the positions of the Quote button
and Reply button. Doing so will help to cut down on some of the needless quoting.

[Paul Mailath]

Originally Posted by Chris Hurd

.... only the relevant portion..

Exactly - and it's not hard to do, just take care to leave the prefix & sufix complete (anything within and including the square brackets)

[Jeff Harper]

I can't help it. It can drive me to distraction, but I try not to let it.

I'm talking about the ridiculous use of quotes.

Why must so many people quote long passages in their comments?

Why must they quote the post that immediatley precedes their post?

Is it to prove they know how to use the quote feature?

The questions I ask are rhetorical. I really don't care why they do it. I just wish they would stop.

[Jeff Harper]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

I can't help it. It can drive me to distraction, but I try not to let it.

I'm talking about the ridiculous use of quotes.

Why must so many people quote long passages in their comments?

Why must they quote the post that immediatley precedes their post?

Is it to prove they know how to use the quote feature?

The questions I ask are rhetorical. I really don't care why they do it. I just wish they would stop.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

[Chris Hurd]

As far as I'm concerned, you're preaching to the choir -- we should probably post some general quoting guidelines, and I need to make the quote button harder to get to... have been thinking about swapping its position with the post reply button.

[Andy Wilkinson]

Or maybe relegate it to the Advanced Options area???

Then all it needs is a windows like idiot proof message after you click the Quote button....something like "Are you really, really, really sure you want to quote THIS!"

:-)

[David Knaggs]

Originally Posted by Chris Hurd

... we should probably post some general quoting guidelines ...

One of DV Info's greatest strengths is its guidelines and policies. It helps make it my favorite board on the net. So I'm definitely going to volunteer my 2 cents worth before Chris makes his final decision about any changes to the posting of quotes.

I personally like to use a selective quote (meaning a one-line excerpt and not the entire post) when I feel it will help highlight or make it easier for others to follow the specific point I am talking about. But that's just me.

However, there are two main "sins" (that I can currently see) with the use of quotes.

Too much information or too little information.

An example of "too much info" is someone who just has to quote, in its entirety, the other person's post in each one of his/her replies.

Too little info is someone who doesn't give enough context for others to know what they are talking about or to whom it is even addressed.

The over-use of quotes doesn't seem too bad on the JVC ProHD or Mac boards which I mostly frequent. But I did a quick search and found a thread on another board from earlier today which epitomizes both extremes of too much and too little info (and I mean absolutely no offense to the participants in that thread, but I wanted to show a real-life example of the pendulum swinging both ways, neither of them really optimum):

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/wedding-e...-you-back.html

Sure enough, there is one member who made 3 posts in that thread and each one had the full quotation of another person's post. So I can see Jeff's point. Totally.

But post #16 of that thread does not use the quote function (which automatically adds the name of the person being quoted) at all - yet it begins with the statement, "Think about what you said in your post. You said that the quality of your work is suffering in order to keep up."

My immediate thought was that he must be referring to the previous poster (#15) by "you". But I found no mention of suffering work quality. So I then checked post #14, then #13, etc., only to eventually find that poster #16 was referring to post #1.

I guess the use of quotes could be considered like metadata. Sometimes it can be like timecode, really useful to quickly find the clip you are looking for (rather than scouring through every single take). But when the metadata starts to overwhelm the data, you've got a big problem.

[Shaun Roemich]

I'm with David on this one (and probably most of the rest here). I quote a fair bit but I TRY to use just the segment I'm MOST directly responding to.

As well, when I first started quoting I didn't realize all I had to do to "select" what I was quoting is hit the quote button and DELETE everything within the body of quoted text that I DIDN'T want to quote.

I think the quote ability is CRUCIAL especially on hot topics where 20 people may respond in an hour and I mean to quote someone 18 posts back for context.

I hope the wisdom of CH and the Keepers of the Forum prevails and we get a workable solution, quite possibly lashing offenders with a length of CAT5 cable.

[Chris Hurd]

Finally, about a year later -- I've now removed the "quote" function from the very last post of a
thread and have replaced it with "reply." Hopefully this will eliminate a lot of unnecessary quoting!

[Bill Busby]

Originally Posted by Chris Hurd

Finally, about a year later

Weee! Chris... You are THE MAN! :D

[Shaun Roemich]

Originally Posted by Shaun Roemich

quite possibly lashing offenders with a length of CAT5 cable.

So CH, when do the lashings begin?

[Chris Hurd]

As soon as I can find a Flash developer to code me up a virtual CAT5 cable lashings app.