A Quick Tutorial on Quoting

[Bravus]

A few people have mentioned lately that they're not sure how to quote the posts that they're responding to, or how to do so selectively in small bites rather than having to quote the whole thing. So I thought I'd help out by briefly describing how to do it. It's quite simple.

In everything that follows, wherever I use a 'curly bracket' { you should use a 'square bracket' [ - I can't use the right ones in my explanation or else the codes would work instead of showing up as examples!

When you hit the 'Quote' link at the bottom of a post in order to quote and respond, what you will see within the reply window that opens is something like:

{quote=Joe Bloggs}Blah blah blah{/quote} (but the 'quote' stuff will be in square brackets)

Those are the 'quote' tags in the UBBCode language that the forum uses, and it's really fairly simple.

{quote} starts a new quote, and any text between it and the {/quote} (note the forward-slash in the ending quote tag) will be inside a quote box.

It's optional, but you can add the name of the person you're quoting (the forum does it automatically if you hit the 'Quote' link. In the example above, 'Joe Bloggs' was the person being quoted. The tag is {quote=Joe Bloggs} - with an equals sign but no spaces other than this within the name, and no quotation marks.

You can type in extra {quote} and {/quote} tags anywhere within the text of the other person's post if you want to break it up into bite-size chunks. For example, I could edit:

{quote=Joe Bloggs}Blah blah blah{/quote}

into

{quote=Joe Bloggs}Blah{/quote} {quote}blah blah{/quote}

Quote tags are like brackets in maths: you have to make sure that you close the same number you open.

You can 'nest' the tags inside each other - the board does this automatically too:

{quote=BillyJoeJimBob}{quote=Joe Bloggs}Blah blah blah{/quote}Yakkety yakkety yak{/quote}

In this case, in response to Joe Blogg's original 'Blah blah blah', BillyJoeJimBob replied 'Yakkety yakkety yak', and you're about to reply to both of them.

Tags can be copied and pasted and treated just like any other text.

I hope I've made it as clear as possible, but there's no substitute for trying it out!

(remember the square brackets)

[Woody]

I dunnno Bravus. There's a lot of Blah Blah there.

[Gail]

Thanks, Bravus!

The quote tags are also inserted when one clicks on the option, which is the icon with the quotation marks on it. You can enter those anywhere in your post, but if you do it that way you need to remember to get your quote INSIDE the tags.

Also, in tidying up multiple quotes if you are selecting and cutting sometimes one of the brackets will be pulled along with the deleted material and will disappear. I don't know how many times I've seen that happen, and have fixed some along the way. Just re-insert the missing parenthesis and you're done.

[Bravus]

Righto, Reader's Digest condensed version for Woody:

{quote}Stuff you want to quote{/quote} (square instead of curly brackets)

[Gail]

I dunnno Bravus. There's a lot of Blah Blah there.

In some cases I don't believe he was too far off the mark.

[Woody]

Righto, Reader's Digest condensed version for Woody:

{quote}Stuff you want to quote{/quote} (square instead of curly brackets)

Oh. U mean squiggly instead of curvy?

[Bravus]

I said 'curly'. 'Curvy' is something different entirely.