Ontological Disproof of God

[emjay]

@negatio. Since you've asked above... The = (equals sign) in an opening tag is used for supplying (optional) parameters of the tag in question, that control/affect its behaviour, in this case, for the quote tag, there are three possible parameters; quote=, pid=, and dateline=, and they determine what will be shown above the quoted text:

If you leave them blank (since they are optional) you'll get a quote box that only says 'Quote:' eg:


The above quote displayed:

Notice it only says 'Quote:' at the top, not 'Author Wrote:', since no author parameter was supplied, nor does it say on the right hand side any date information such as an actual date or 'x mins/hours ago', since no date parameter was supplied. So this, without parameters, is basically the use of the quote tag pared to the bone.

When you press Reply on the other hand, all of those parameters are automatically filled in for you and most of the time you should not have to mess with them, for instance (just showing one of my previous posts for the sake of this demonstration):


The above quote displayed:

Note that all three parameters were automatically supplied when the Reply button was pressed, and in the output it says 'emjay Wrote:' above the text on the left, using the supplied author parameter, and the datetime information above the text on the right, using the supplied 'dateline' parameter.

So that's the difference in syntax and appearance between a quote tag supplied with no parameters... as you might if you want to construct a quote from scratch, rather than replying to a specific post on the site... and one with parameters, as for instance supplied automatically when you press the Reply button. As a user you shouldn't ever realistically need to manually supply the latter two parameters - pid and dateline - because they are specific to replying to a particular post on the site, so they should always be supplied automatically when you press the Reply button to do that. But the first one, quote='author', you might do manually from time to time, for instance to quote some famous author.

Hope this is helpful.

Wow, thanks a million emjay, you really know your stuff.  I am not so inept at responding to posts that my whole thread looks horrid, and it is giving people headaches to spend time here !  I just now recently figured out how and where to write in the space I am typing in right now, but, I am not even sure if it is proper to type now, without entering some special code...

You're welcome Well, if you don't know, you don't know, but you're getting there so it's all good Anyway, you shouldn't have to write any special code anywhere, just whatever you want to write... as long as it's after the quote, but you seem to be getting the hang of that now.

I will say one thing though, which may unfortunately add a bit of confusion; you seem to be multiquoting... ie you've replied to my post but there is another one quoted before it... which I've now removed from my reply to you, which is making your posts particularly massive, dragging around stuff that you're not directly replying to. To fix that, if you're using the desktop site (ie on a computer), scroll down to the bottom of the screen and look at the box called "Quick Reply"; if at the bottom of that text box it says "You have selected one or more posts to quote. Quote these posts now or deselect them" then that means that you still have quotes selected with the Multiquote button - which allows you to select any number of posts to quote at once. You may have used the Multiquote button by accident instead of the Reply button, since it is next to the Reply button and perhaps deceptively entitled "Quote" (with a little green plus sign... which changes to a little red minus sign if you press the button, indicating that it has now added that post to the list of posts to quote at once). So my guess is that you've, perfectly understandably, done that at some point so it still has some posts in memory that haven't been cleared, and therefore putting them/it at the beginning of all your subsequent posts. That happened to me once, and I had to figure out how to solve it, but thankfully it's simple; all you have to do is click the italicized 'deselect them' link shown above, as it appears in the Quick Reply box. After that that message should disappear, indicating that your multiquote list is now clear.