to think that MN's forum is massively crap for having bad quoting facilities?

[frgr]

i get terribly lost in long threads because people all use their own way to quote other bits of people;s posts?

AIBU to sigh and wonder why MN doesn't add a better quoting thing, automatically, on posts?

MN should add a little button next to each post (next to the report link) saying "quote", and then it should take you to the normal Reply page automatically, with the poster's name in bold, and a little border around the bit you've quoted

it would make inter-post communication and logical following of threads much easier

i surely can't the only one to have suggested this? or is there some facility there which we've all not using?

so AIBU to think that MN's forum quoting (or lack of) is supremely crap?

funny janiesmum cause every other forum i've been on doesn't come close to being as readable at this one.

I don't think I'd like a formal quote facility, but am constantly astonished by the number of people who cut and paste part of other people's quotes but don't mark them as quotes at all - then just carry on typing after the quoted bits so it all becomes one undifferentiated post.

How hard is it to add "quote marks" around the bits you cut and paste . I mean you don't even have to be super sophisticated and italic or bold them, just quote marks would do the job.

Maybe there should be a "fuckwit's guide to quote marks" alongside the smileys.

I assume that was ironic, SEA, when you posted that 'I agree' one-liner.

Hecate - thanks for the compliment - perhaps ~15 years on USENET where there was no 'quote' originally on software I used, and every minute on long distance dial-up was costing me helped make me try to limit quotes (though perhaps age means I ramble when compared with so many of the Twitter generation who post only 1 or 2 sentences at a time).

Quite agree that having tens of thousands of posts per week it is good to have a 'simple' layout (not sure that the Tweet and FB links are needed, but by not having mottos, signatures or any little photos alongside every post goes some way to make sure the message section runs (mostly) quite fast.

One minor quibble is the expectation that people are using wide screen displays. These posts are too wide for my old iMac (the chunky 14" portable TV style Mac) but that is similar for the BBC site, where they took a decision and 's*d anyone with an older machine or poor eyesight that uses 800 x 600'.

PS I stand by my assertion that a button to quote can encourage a lazy attitude, causing the 'whole post' quotes all too easily.

It was not uncommon in days gone by for many (American) AOL users to add on "me too" comments while quoting whole posts, and some get into the bad habit of typing a response prior to the piece quoted.

Microsoft eventually changed MS Outlook Express after they had lots of (geeky) complaints that it encouraged 'top posting' and meant a series of comments were in reverse chronologic order and became a complete mess.

While many posters are careful, I wonder how many send e-mail where they put a short 'response' at the start ('top') of their message ?

NG, your posts are like a little history of discussion boards in a nutshell

I have been using multi-user systems since Autumn 1975, working in a support role (for Students and Staff) from about 5 years later, using local and wide area networks, USENET and E-Mail from about 1985, and the internet as we know it now from around 10 years later.

Have been fortunate enough to be able to see progress as I went along, but still find there are new facilities and services (some of which I have tried but am unlikely to use, such as FaceBook, Twitter and FourSquare), so I still learn new facts every day.

While no expert on the latest trends, I have plenty of troubleshooting experience, and can generally learn how something works quite quickly.

< makes note >

can you tell me why my t key keeps fucking sticking ?

I have to hit it with a hammer (virtually) to get it to work

personally, I think it may be the wine/tea/chocolate/crisps/crumbs etc that have been variously chucked on it

but why just that one ?

one thing that could make it easier to find posts that are being responded to, rather than quoting the post, would be for the response to contain a link to the post they are commenting on (like replying on Twitter)

I don't even know if that's feasible. but tbh I like mn how it is

Your "T" key is sticking because, um, there's something stuck in it. Some keyboards make it very easy to remove the key and get rid of any offending cruft. Other ones - laptop keyboards in particular - have annoyingly fragile and intricate mechanisms that are a righteous pain in the arse.

On a slow moving thread then quoting isn't necessary. One a thread where there are loads of people posting quickly you often see messages being posted and then the same poster coming back and saying "Actually, my last message was a response to WhooZit's post of 23:45".

I can live without the quoting. Particularly as it does encourage the nasty habit of quoting the entire message for a three-word response. What I would love to see is proper message threading like you used to get on Usenet and CIX but I can't see that happening.

you probably got too much gunk under it.

If it is a laptop, then tough... :)

My solution is to not let dust and grime get in, by plugging in a cheap USB multimedia keyboard (so I have mute, vol+, vol-, etc on a set of individual buttons), so laptop is away from coffee, biscuits, etc, and these keyboards were bought together so layout is identical whichever PC is in use. (Had a problem on Windows 7, so I gave Win 7 laptop to my sister!)

I want to do same for iMac/eMac situation, soon, as one keyboard has a fault and shift-R won't work.

Willie - yes, having an automatic link back to an earlier post is done on the ThinkBroadband forum, and there is the choice of a threaded view (eg for Snorbs) or chronologic order as a flat listing, like MN.

Threads can work well, but am not so convinced in a web browser environment.

YABU this is the only forum I can stand because it has no pointless quotes every five mins and no stupid photos of various famous people that the posters happen to fancy at the bottom of every post. Now that is just maddening.

its generally seen as passive agressive

I do wonder if it's a deliberate design to minimise an endless quote regurgitaion culture.

"but in general i think it is seen as bad form"

But is quoting bad form Custy if one agrees with you?

err, yes, it's a laptop

a rather ancient one

My W was sticking yesterday so today I've spent ages with the slimy goo stuff that's supposed to clean your keyboard. There was still a lot of fluff so I got a pointy thing to poke it out (I blame the cat who insists on walking across my keyboard all the time). I was very gentle but somehow the C button has come off and I can't get it back on again. I'm using it but it's very wobbly. Tell me I haven't ruined my laptop.

Sorry that wasn't all meant to be in bold!??!

And sorry for hijacking too

PAforPM and Pixel... a new keyboard may cost as much as 75 quid ( plus labour to fit - when I looked into this for someone who had spilt wine into his laptop, the manufacturer instructions indicated 18 tiny screws were used to hold the keyboard in the laptop, and to get to them required removing the panels from the back and then about 3/4 of the hardware too )

20 quid may get you a wireless keyboard where there'd be a USB wireless receiver at the laptop and you would have the keyboard on your lap, or table, etc... check Ebay.

oo ta

I've usually found modern laptop keyboards fairly easy to replace. There's almost always a plastic strip just above the keyboard that unclips and then there are three or four screws underneath that. The keyboard then just lifts out.

The fiddly bit is disconnecting the ribbon cable(s) and then reconnecting the new one. The connectors are tiny and I've got big fingers.

I do agree, though, that laptop keyboards can be extortionately expensive. Sometimes you're lucky and it's less than £50, sometimes you're looking at the thick end of £100.

Pixel, laptop keys usually have an intricate little scissor-like arrangement underneath them. It's there to stop the key from wobbling. There's a guide here that may help you get the key back on provided that none of the clips have snapped off.

I've never seen it said that quoting is bad form - indeed, I think it's useful, especially on a long, fast-moving thread, if you want to respond to a particular point made by a particular poster. And since when did we ever worry about passive aggressive posts on MN?

However, I really, really don't want to see a quote facility here, because IME of other fora, they are always used in a really lazy way - i.e. the whole post is quoted, rather than the relevant sentence(s), and usually followed by a pretty meaningless 'lol' or 'pmsl'.

Why can't we just carry on using C+P? That works perfectly well. The only issue I have is that people tend to do this without any punctuation to indicate that it's a quote, so often I am left thinking, "that sounds familiar", before I realise it's a quote!

So if you're going to C+P a quote, use speechmarks, or put it in italics or bold - it's easy to use either of those facilities now to highlight a whole sentence (compared with previously when you used to have to put italics round every word)

Thank you, I've managed to fix the key back on, took about an hour and I was starting to panic a bit, then realised that two of the little metal hooks had got squashed down. I prised them up again and two seconds later it all clicked together. Phew!