How do I quote other posts?

[wiploc]

A tip for responding to different parts of a single post:

===begin several response example===

This is the first line of Joe's post.

This is Sara's response to the first line of Joe's post.

This is the second line of Joe's post.

This is Sara's response to the second line of Joe's post.

This is the third line of Joe's post.

This is Sara's response to the third line of Joe's post.

===end several response example===

How you make that easy is by creating this block of text. But use square brackets instead of curly brackets. In this example, I'm using curly brackets so that they won't execute, so you can see the code rather than the result of the code.

===begin block of text example===
{/quote}





{quote}
===end block of text example

So, you type that up, probably at the bottom of the post you're responding to. Then you highlight it and copy it to your clipboard. (If you have an apple product, maybe copy it something that does the same thing as a clipboard but has a different function?)

Then just go to the place in your victim's text where you need to interject wisdom. Control-v pastes the block of text in right where your cursor is. This ends your victim's prose, leaves you five blanklines to respond in, and then starts up your victim's text again.

You write your response on the second of those five blanklines.

Why five blanklines? It's a visual spacing thing. When you proofread your post before posting, you want those visual gaps to make it obvious where your material is, where your deathless prose begins and your opponent's idiocy restarts. This becomes most important when there's a lot of back and forth so material is quoted over and over, but ever more indented. The wider gap makes it obvious where the new material is.

Or at least it works out that way on some discussion boards.

Over at Talk Freethought, I mentioned that people should lobby the sysadmin for a button that would automate this process, and poof! the button came into being. It didn't have five blanklines, but hey, you can't have everything. And if everybody used five blanklines, my text would no longer stand out in a mass of nested requotes. I might have to start using something like this:

===begin modified block of text===
{/quote}
~~~~~~~~~~~~





~~~~~~~~~~~~
{quote}
===end modified block of text===

If somebody here wants to suggest an INSERT-RESPONCE-HERE button to the sysadmin, that's up to you.