[Tutorial] How to use the quote function

[pocaracas]

I wrote this in some post to a guy who was pissing everyone off by not quoting people properly.
@mods, Feel free to move this to the appropriate place or trash it, if you feel the old BB-tags tutorial still applies.


This Tutorial is all about the Quote tag.

But first, some preparation:
Go to your User Control Panel's Options, or use this link: https://atheistforums.org/usercp.php?action=options
Near the bottom right, you'll find the option "Put the editor in source mode by default", activate that.
I know it's not active by default... whoever thought up this MyBB forum, decided to impose the "new and improved WYSIWYG" editor.... but this editor is crap when you want to break apart quotes from other people. It's good for most other purposes, though...

Now that you have the "source" editor, you will see the tags that are used to make the posts pretty.

The one you need to master is the quote tag.

I'll be using this sign >>> to signal the start and end of an example of the result of the codes I'm explaining.

For example, your post gets this tag:

Code:

[quote='Soldat Du Christ' pid='1418943' dateline='1476749980']

It automatically appears when you hit the Reply button below every post.

You can shorten it to just

Code:

[quote]

or

Code:

[quote='Soldat Du Christ']

The 'pid' you find above refers to the Post ID - In that example, it was this forum's 1,418,943rd post.
The 'dateline' refers to the date when the post was made. It's a long number that counts how many seconds have passed since January 1st 1970 - this is the standard Linux time representation. You can use this site to convert that into something you can understand, if you need it: http://www.epochconverter.com/


Now that you know a bit about the tag, time to learn how to use it properly.

Here's the basic that gets automatically filled when you hit the Reply button:

Code:

[quote='Soldat Du Christ' pid='1418943' dateline='1476749980']
Your text.
[/quote]

The result, when I answer, is:
>>>

Your text.

My answer to your text.
>>>

But I can break apart your text into bits so I can address each of them and it looks decent:

Code:

[quote='Soldat Du Christ' pid='1418943' dateline='1476749980']
Your first point.
[/quote]

My answer to your first point.

[quote='Soldat Du Christ' pid='1418943' dateline='1476749980']
Your second point.
[/quote]

My answer to your second point.


and so on and so forth...

Which gives this neat looking sequence:
>>>

Your first point.

My answer to your first point.

Your second point.

My answer to your second point.


and so on and so forth...
>>>

Some people are lazy and, instead of copy/pasting the quote tag into each of those points, they simply type out an empty quote tag... it's fine, as long as it follows from the previous identified quote tag.
Like so:

Code:

[quote='Soldat Du Christ' pid='1418943' dateline='1476749980']
Your first point.
[/quote]

My answer to your first point.

[quote]
Your second point.
[/quote]

My answer to your second point.


and so on and so forth...

Note how the empty quote tag does not provide you with a little green arrow linking to the post being quoted, nor the date:
>>>

Your first point.

My answer to your first point.

Your second point.

My answer to your second point.


and so on and so forth...
>>>


If you're quoting another person in the same post, it's good netiquette to properly identify each quote.
Even better, you can add a horizontal rule distinguishing the two (this gets added automatically during your first 30 days on the forum, when you reply within 2 hours of your last post and no one posted something after that last post). If you want to add by yourself, the horizontal rule's tag is [ hr ] (without the spaces).

Code:

[quote='Soldat Du Christ' pid='1418943' dateline='1476749980']
Your first point.
[/quote]

My answer to your first point.

[quote]
Your second point.
[/quote]

My answer to your second point.

[hr]

[quote='Aractus' pid='1419192' dateline='1476787098']
Aractus' text
[/quote]

Reply to Aractus' text.

Which produces this beauty:
>>>

Your first point.

My answer to your first point.

Your second point.

My answer to your second point.

---

Aractus' text

Reply to Aractus' text.

>>>


There, I hope you found this small Tutorial useful and will forever use the quote tags as they were intended.
Most of what I put here is also applicable to other online forums! Scroll to the bottom, where you have the "powered by" notices. If you see a BB in there, things work pretty much the same way... some features may not be implemented, like the 'dateline', or they may have other ways of achieving the same result, but the basic [ quote = "username" ] is always there.

[brewer]

Now that's just fucking funny.