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Is there any formal etiquette for using the post quoting feature? It seems rather obnoxious when people quote a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote. It breaks the flow of communication. It also circumvents efforts to "ignore" posters when their posts wind up inside other non-ignored posts.

If there is no official quoting etiquette, I'd request that we, the good users of Dakka, refrain from using the quote function unless something specific needs to addressed. It maintains the flow of conversation better, and let's those of us attempting to ignore others have an easier go of that.

If there is concern that an unintended poster may think you're referring to them, you can direct your reply to someone by mentioning their name. For example,

@UserName: Your political views are the opposite of mine, which makes you a daemon in my eyes, with no possible redeeming qualities. You are a monster, your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries. We clearly will never agree on policies. That is because I am right and you are wrong. Burn forever in the heat of your own evil. Yours truly, OtherUserName.

That way, if UserName is on someone's ignore list, they didn't have to see their post.

(/quotebait)

This is definitely something I wish more users would be cognizant of, but there's no official policy.

If I see something really egregious (a gigantic quote block with only a single sentence reply, for instance) I'll edit in spoiler tags to hide the quoted portion, and sometimes put a mod note in the thread asking people to only quote large text blocks when necessary.

You can also hit the yellow triangle to alert a mod if it's getting really out of hand in a thread, and someone will check it out and see if mod action is necessary.

Much better for people just to use good posting etiquette in general, though, as you said!

 greatbigtree wrote:
If there is no official quoting etiquette, I'd request that we, the good users of Dakka, refrain from using the quote function unless something specific needs to addressed.

That is my own personal policy, which I would love to see more posters employ.

Could it not auto-spoiler of the quote pyramid gets to huge? Or not allow more than, say, 5 nested quotes?

IMO quote pyramids are annoying, but single-line quotes are the way to do it. Posting @username makes a long post much less readable since it isn't broken up into sections, and it isn't clear what part of a post a given comment is responding to. Quoting the specific thing you're replying to with each part of your own post is the right way to do it. Example:

I HAVE AWFUL POLITICS.

Yes, you do. off and die.

AND I LOVE TO EAT BABIES

You monster.

But only the specific part of the replied-to post needs to be quoted, the rest of the chain should be removed unless it's really important to understanding the context of what you're replying to.

As for viewing ignored users' posts, I don't give a about that. The ignore function is a bad feature in the first place, and I see no reason to care about someone having to see a person's posts. It's certainly not worth compromising the readability of a post to pander to people who don't have the self control to stop reading when they encounter something they don't like.

You could also try removing some of the earlier quotes to save on space. So for instance:

CadianCannonFodder5023 wrote:

Angry Commissar wrote:

Kaldor Draigo wrote:Lex Luthor likes lettuce

WHAT?!? How dare you speak the name of lettuce in front of the God Emperor? You must be purged alien! PURGED!

Hey folks! Know any good lettuce recipies?

Becomes:

CadianCannonFodder5023 wrote:
Hey folks! Know any good lettuce recipies?

And then you can satisfy the guardman’s thirst for knowledge on lettuce cooking. In case the quote pyramid conversation continues, other posters might just go along with that “severed” pyramid. If you need to reference an earlier thread, you can just quote that earlier post.

A lot of these truths are self-evident.

I suspect that many of the prime offenders here might be Mobile Users, where managing things in posts isn't quite as easy?

Try doing that on a 4" phone screen

...which was...my point?

So yes, since Dakka Dakka isn't truly 'mobile friendly', things like this will likely continue...forever!

Ah, well, worth a request. Thanks for the consideration!

 SkavenLord wrote:
You could also try removing some of the earlier quotes to save on space. So for instance:

CadianCannonFodder5023 wrote:

Angry Commissar wrote:

Kaldor Draigo wrote:Lex Luthor likes lettuce

WHAT?!? How dare you speak the name of lettuce in front of the God Emperor? You must be purged alien! PURGED!

Hey folks! Know any good lettuce recipies?

Becomes:

CadianCannonFodder5023 wrote:
Hey folks! Know any good lettuce recipies?

And then you can satisfy the guardman’s thirst for knowledge on lettuce cooking. In case the quote pyramid conversation continues, other posters might just go along with that “severed” pyramid. If you need to reference an earlier thread, you can just quote that earlier post.

Yeah. When you get 10 quote, full on stacks, with detail. It has ts fairly tricky. But editing on mobile is not easiest to do with huge amounts of text.

They can make mobile experience a a little tricky.

People could avoid Sir Bruce-ing, just a thought. I've been guilty of that in the past, I'm not throwing the first stone or anything, but let's say I've learned that

A: People can figure out what you're talking about. Quote-warring just makes the whole world text-blind.

B: Usually when it gets to that point, it's just two people playing a game anyhow. Friendly or unfriendly, it's a game for two and a quick "@ UserName" will let anyone disinterested in the topic of contention move along. Plus, split quotes with one line replies is asinine to read. Again, I've been guilty of that in the past but really, the person you're quoting knows what they wrote, and they know you're talking to them. The quote doesn't often need to be there.

And it breaks up the flow. You read something, then reread +1, then reread +1 +2, then reread +1+2+3... whereas a directed reply has continuous, conversational flow to it. When we speak, we don't repeat the last 7 exchanges before addIng an 8th point, and we don't expect our co-discussor to repeat the last 8 before moving onto a 9th.

I acknowledge that there's a time and place for it, but not pages' worth of quotes to then reply with a "Hells yeah, that'll show my political opponents! They'll never recover from that barb!"

Anyhow, as mentioned, I appreciate having had a chance to air this, and if someone else decides to be the change they want to see, awesome.

 SkavenLord wrote:
You could also try removing some of the earlier quotes to save on space.

That's my preferred method. I also snip out parts of the post that are not what I am responding to, instead of making yet another box. It's important to actually type (snip) or something like that so you're not misrepresenting what the person you are quoting said.

I will also spoiler long blocks but I pretty much never have to do that because no one wants a giant quote pyramid. I also try to do single, or at best, few sentence quotes. Just quote as much as you need to make it clear what you are referencing.

I don't like that @username style because I don't want to scroll up to see what that person said.

 Peregrine wrote:
As for viewing ignored users' posts, I don't give a about that. The ignore function is a bad feature in the first place, and I see no reason to care about someone having to see a person's posts. It's certainly not worth compromising the readability of a post to pander to people who don't have the self control to stop reading when they encounter something they don't like.

Going to have to agree to disagree with you on that. I rarely ignore people - I don't ignore people because I disagree with them, I ignore people when they argue in bad faith consistently for a long time. - and as D-USA once told me, it makes for a handy tripwire to remind you that you already established this person is not worth talking to, do you really need to respond? It's less about not seeing what they posted and more about reminding myself that I don't need to get baited into the 500th round of intellectual calvinball.

Pretty much use mobile exclusively at the moment. Power supply went out recently.

Anyways, if I am having a discussion that turns in to just me and the other person, I will take it to spoiler tags and just say @Person or whatever above. It has worked and it helps declutter the thread. I try to do a lot of editing on mobile and it can be tricky. Sometimes you end up having to delete more than you intended because you cant get between an I[ with your finger. Leads to some real confusing mistakes.

I get that. Truthfully, I wouldn't know how to edit on my mobile. Bit of a techanderthall, me.

And yes, the tripwire has saved me from seeing something I know is apt to be triggering. At least I know if I'm choosing to open it up, I am choosing.

Some days, I'm not looking for irritation. I just want to log in, see what's new, and get on with my day. I appreciate the ignore function.

I post mostly from mobile now, and manually edit my quote trees, and yes it's a huge pain

One alternative I've seen on the Privateer Press forums - a quote only ever includes the last person's post, and removes any prior quoted sections they had.

But sometimes you really want to quote something that another person is quoting, and getting all that text back in is even worse on mobile than what we have now

 greatbigtree wrote:
A: People can figure out what you're talking about. Quote-warring just makes the whole world text-blind.

On the other hand I can't even count the number of times someone has made a reply without quote tags (usually thinking they'd have the immediate next post) and someone else assumes they were replying to a different thing, often with a very different meaning because of that assumption. Quote tags on the exact statement make it clear to everyone.

B: Usually when it gets to that point, it's just two people playing a game anyhow. Friendly or unfriendly, it's a game for two and a quick "@ UserName" will let anyone disinterested in the topic of contention move along. Plus, split quotes with one line replies is asinine to read. Again, I've been guilty of that in the past but really, the person you're quoting knows what they wrote, and they know you're talking to them. The quote doesn't often need to be there.

This is a forum, not a conversation. The person you are replying to and the people you are talking to (AKA "everyone who reads it") are not the same, and people joining in later won't have the understanding you assume.

When we speak, we don't repeat the last 7 exchanges before addIng an 8th point, and we don't expect our co-discussor to repeat the last 8 before moving onto a 9th.

That's because in a spoken conversation you don't spend 15 minutes outlining every point of your argument up front while nobody else talks, you discuss the first point for a while, then move on to the next one, etc. Forums have an entirely different structure and trying to treat them as spoken conversations leads to nonsense.

I don't like the "@ blah blah" thing. It's equal to or more annoying than anything when you're trying to scan a thread and have to scan back based on user name to try and figure out what it was in response to.

Quoting as much of what someone said without going crazy (eg. don't quote 10000 words of multiple quotes just to add 1 line to the discussion) I think is the best way, that avoids making people feel like you've taken stuff out of context and gives people coming late a thread to follow the conversation.

It is frustrating on mobile devices though. it'd be nice if we could just highlight a portion of text and press quote, but I don't imagine anything like that is possible. Having to trim sections of someone else's post without messing up the quote formatting can definitely be tricky and has led me to say "feth it" and give up trying to reply at times.

Of course in discussions like the US politics thread (or half of the threads in the off topic forum) it really doesn't matter because no sane person goes back through those threads anyway, you might as well be yelling in to the ether with those threads. But anything in painting/news/plogs there's a decent chance people will want to be able to filter through old posts so making them easier to read is desirable.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
it'd be nice if we could just highlight a portion of text and press quote

It is possible, at least for forums in general. For example, the EVE Online forums have this feature. You have to have the reply box on the same page as the thread (on the EVE forums it stays at the bottom as you scroll), but highlighting text pops up a "quote" button that puts the quote and quote tags into the reply box. So it's very easy to quickly construct a reply to multiple posts.

So without quotes how are you supposed to show others to what parts you are refering to? There could be already several pages worth of posts. Most don't follow and write here 24/7 so...

Now quote inside quote inside quote inside quote yeah that's bad. But just starting out with no context as to which message you are replying...

Yeah, numerous nested quotes are the main issue, along with quoting a huge text block just to add a minimal reply (if you want to show context, better to snip out a section of the post or use spoiler tags for the whole thing, if your reply is going to be really brief).