Quoting Posts - Suggestion

Games Other Halo
1

Hey, I’m The Little Moa and I’d thought I’d post another suggestion to hopefully make the forums a little easier to use.

Quoting

So I’m sure we are all aware of what quoting is and what use it has. It allows for users to interact without having to rely on a user to randomly guess if they’re replying to them or not.

Now, there is a problem I see with quoting on a daily basis. What is it? When people quote the original poster when they have made a long post using a large chunk of their 7,500 character limit.

Example Image

Link to example: http://oi41.tinypic.com/2uqev6s.jpg

As you can see, the OP has clearly made a valuable topic that many are going to agree with. Now there are two options here. You can either do A or B.

A: You click the Thank button and show the OP your support and optionally add some input later on in the topic.
B: You click the quote button, quote the entire OP and have a short answer which makes your post really long for no reason.

A lot of people go with Option B and without intention, clutter the first page of the topic.

What should happen about it?

Well it goes without saying that it’s pretty annoying that someone just quotes your post and adds little to nothing to the discussion, but it’s even more annoying that they quoted the entire post, making it extremely cluttered.

I have two suggestions that could resolve this whole issue.

Suggestion #1

If a user quotes the OP and adds a small few words/sentences after that - then a moderator should be allowed to edit said post to remove the OP’s quote and replace it with something like “-snip-”.

Suggestion #2

The forums would receive some backend work from the web team which would automatically remove LONG quotes when you hit the reply button (providing you hadn’t edited it at all.)

I’d prefer Suggestion #1 most of all, there are a lot more glaring issues on the forums right now like email notifications, statistics being wildly inaccurate, etc.

Hopefully we can let this get enough attention for it to have any effect and the days of long quotes, short replies will finally be over.

2

> As you can see, the OP has clearly made a valuable topic that many are going to agree with. Now there are two options here. You can either do A or B.
>
> A: You click the Thank button and show the OP your support and optionally add some input later on in the topic.
> B: You click the quote button, quote the entire OP and have a short answer which makes your post really long for no reason.
>
> A lot of people go with Option B and without intention, clutter the first page of the topic.

Remember option C… That is where smart users only quote the part that they are referring to just as I did right now

:slight_smile:

3

> Quoting

Moa, I found another bug with the quoting system… For some reason when I quote somebody, it puts a whole bunch of random numbers after their gamertag, I have no idea what that is for so I usually delete the numbers. I just quoted you and now after your name it shows the number 2675382… Wierd…

4

> <mark>Hey, I’m The Little Moa</mark> and I’d thought I’d post another suggestion to hopefully make the forums a little easier to use.

Glad you cleared that up.

> -snip-

Agreed.

Option A is probably best, as the automatic system won’t always know if you may have added stuff to the original quote.

5

> Moa, I found another bug with the quoting system… For some reason when I quote somebody, it puts a whole bunch of random numbers after their gamertag, I have no idea what that is for so I usually delete the numbers. I just quoted you and now after your name it shows the number 2675382… Wierd…

Waypoint is supposed to convert those numbers into a link to the quoted post. It doesn’t work most of the time. I’ve found that if I keep refreshing the page, sometimes it works.

What if quotes were automatically collapsed and had to be expanded, like with spoilers? That would really help cut down on the unnecessary space.