Okay I’m not a techie, so I may not know the actual terms for what I am about to describe; so any pedants please suppress that urge to correct my choice of words while simultaneously failing to address the actual concern stated, thanks:
You know how you can highlight a portion of someone’s comment and the option to quote them in a response directly to them pops up?
Well, perhaps one of those is doing something weird or intermittent; I dunno. You could test the theory by disabling them temporarily while on the BBS and seeing if quoting works right then. Or maybe codinghorror is secretly driving trollies you.
(Edit: What is wrong with me and why am I doing tech support for somebody else’s BBS software?)
I click the grey “quote reply” box and it comes up like this:
Which seems so wrong, so I type in a clarification in brackets, like this:
Is it the BBS or is it me? I’ve seen this happen in other people’s posts too.
Usually if I’m trying to quote someone’s quote of someone else, I’ll just use the “Reply” button and then hit the speech balloon in the left corner to quote the entire thing, and then edit out any bits I’m not wanting to quote.
Alternatively, you can edit the incorrectly-quoted bits to add in the missing quote tags, but that’s usually more work.
On the original issue, I’ve seen it a bit inconsistent lately myself. Usually if I just re-highlight the text a few times, it eventually shows up again.
You can use the little “bubble” icon to quote the full post of somebody – this will keep the attributions straight. You can then delete any text that you don’t want.
Edit: didn’t notice that @Nonentity beat me by an hour – I guess that I better go coffee-up
Ha! My, doesn’t that work nicely
Thank you @crenquis and @Nonentity
(Clearly I should take a look around the place a little more.)
And now I want to shout it from the rooftops, so everyone will know to use the quote-bubble icon like that—because the misattributions that result from the other way can be confusing or even misleading. There have been times in controversial-subject threads when I’ve seen someone quoted in a reply and thought There’s no way that person would have said that! and traced it back to find that they had actually been quoting someone else.
