Quoting is a very useful feature. With it, you can respond to a specific part of any post. Our quote feature automatically ‘tags’ the poster you are quoting – and, it even supplies a way to go quickly to the originating (full) post. We have various methods to quote content throughout our site. This help page provides from simple, to more complicated, methods, each with a description, followed by short video to demonstrate live.
This site uses BB code for formatting, a web safe formatting language for user use. We have a helpful page containing the BBCode that can be used here.
The core basic to providing content within a quotation is wrapping that content within quote BBCode. All BBCode has an opening and closing tag. This is useful when you are quoting from a different document or website, and want to be clear that you are quoting, not using your own words:
Reply is useful when you want to respond to an entire post by someone else. When you hit ‘reply’, you will automatically be given a tag with the entire post. The advantage: it identifies which post (and poster) you are responding to. The disadvantage: it’s very general and you may quote a lot of text that has no meaning towards the purpose of quoting. If all you want to do is alert the user, Tagging does this (discussed later).
Reply should only be used when quoting a small response OR you plan to break the quoted reply into multiple responses.
Multi-quote (+quote) is reply on steroids. Multi-quote copies all +quote to a clipboard. In other words, you can go to any thread, any forum, use +quote to take information from all over the community, then have it in one place to insert into a post you are constructing. The advantage: you can edit the quotes, however much or little you’d like. For people on touch-screens, this can be easier than attempting to quote from highlight (discussed next). The disadvantage: you have to do a manual edit.
The preferred system that utilizes both reply and multi-quote, just highlight specific text (mouse or touch device) and you will see a reply and +quote option appear. They work exactly as above, except now you quote only the highlighted portion, opposed to editing at reply.
When you want to reply to a specific member, without need to quote their posts, you can ‘tag’ them. First, type the ‘at’ sign, as @. Then, start typing the member’s name. No space between the @ and the name. After two characters, a menu of possible member names will drop down and you can select the one you want. The options will refine as you continue typing. When you post your reply, the member’s name will appear in blue, and they will be notified via alert (maximum 5 alerts will be sent) that they were tagged in a post – as long as their notifications are on.
It will appear like this: @anthony, linking to their profile.