How do I quote from a post?

[flight954]

I can't for the life of me figure out how to insert a quote from another persons post. Can somebody help a brother out?

[zoomie]

... some text ...

Put your text in between those. You can also copy the text, paste it in your reply, select it all, and click the thought bubble above the reply window. It looks like this: http://www.thefiringline.com/forums/images/editor/quote.gif

[flight954]

put your text in between those, but take out the spaces. You can also copy the text, paste it in your reply, select it all, and click the thought bubble above the reply window.

like this

[Al Norris]

Here's a couple of other ways to do what you want to do.

Suppose you wanted to put the person's name in your quote (you might want to do this because you're quoting someone a page or two back). After you got your initial quote around the material,

Some kind of text

which then would look like this:
Some kind of text
You add their name like this:

Some kind of text

Which makes it look like this:
Some kind of text
Sometimes it can get a little more complex. Say you wrote something and someone else responded to what you wrote. Now you want to respond to what they wrote, but want it completely in context, so there won't be any misunderstanding. What you do is this:

I said something.You replied something else.

You could also "block diagram" the structure like this:


I said something.
You replied something else.

Regardless, it comes out looking like this:
I said something.You replied something else.

This type of "nesting" quotes can be taken to several levels:
I said something.You replied something else.He stated a rebuttal of both You and IShe rebutted everyone!

To do this, notice how the "reverse order" of who said what is used:




I said something.
You replied something else.
He stated a rebuttal of both You and I
She rebutted everyone!

There's one more device that can be used.

Suppose you wanted to reference something that someone wrote, but it was in another thread? The current vBulletin version has a little device to do just that, within the quote:

I can't for the life of me figure out how to insert a quote from another persons post. Can somebody help a brother out?

Notice that I inserted a semi-colon after the name and then put some kind of number there? That refers to the actual post I'm referencing. You can find it in the url of the post (upper right hand corner of the post). Just right click the post number, save the link to the clipboard and paste it into the quote command, then delete everything except the number itself. It ends up looking like this:
I can't for the life of me figure out how to insert a quote from another persons post. Can somebody help a brother out?
Then you can just click on the little http://thefiringline.com/forums/images/buttons/viewpost.gif and be taken directly to the thread, with that post you are referencing.

There. Everything you wanted to know about using quotes, but never thought to ask.

[grymster2007]

QUOTE, quote, and Quote are all the same

I tried a couple variations on getting a pointer to not just the thread, but also a particular post (as in above). No luck. Is there any way to do this?

[Mal H]

No, that function was deleted on TFL. You need to copy/paste any text you want to quote.

[grymster2007]

I understand that one would have to copy and paste the particular text one wanted to quote, but I was hoping to get a pointer to the specific post from which one was quoting, not just to the thread, which could consist of dozens or more posts.

Al's demonstration takes one to the thread, not a particular post in a thread.

My head hurts. :)

[Mal H]

Ah, gotcha! (I think.)

If you need a link to a specific post, use the URL of the post number (you can click on the post number or get the properties of it by right clicking on it.) Then include that URL in your post as a hyperlink, either in your post text or in the quoted text.

For example, here is your post #7 above as a hyper link:
Your post. (http://thefiringline.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3161370&postcount=7)

and the raw URL of the post from the properties:
http://www.thefiringline.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3161370&postcount=7

[Note that long URL's are truncated to save space. The full length URL is:
http://www.thefiringline.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3161370&postcount=7 ]

[grymster2007]

My headache is of my own making. The little pointer thingy that Al demonstrated does take one to a particular post, not just the thread.

Like this.

My head hurts!

Sorry to run you around Mal.... hope your head don't hurt too bad! :o

[Al Norris]

Grymaster2007, my demonstration takes you to the thread, with the indicated post as the first post seen. Since I used post #1, it just "looked" like it was taking you to the beginning of the thread. Let's use another example... Say, post #3:

Right clicking and copying that post gives us:
http://thefiringline.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3159795&postcount=3

Now deleting everything but the post number gives us: 3159795. Now, when we make the quotable text, we get:

I can't for the life of me figure out how to insert a quote from another persons post. Can somebody help a brother out?

Notice, there are no spaces before or after the "=", just as there are no spaces before or after the ";". So we end up with this:

I can't for the life of me figure out how to insert a quote from another persons post. Can somebody help a brother out?
This took us not only to the thread, but placed the post we were quoting as the first post seen by our browser.

Now, let's look at it the way I suggested it be used. Say I wanted to quote something from the Avatars thread (on this forum). I would concatenate it this way:

Blame me:

Which would look like this:
Blame me:
Click on it and see.

So what is the real use for this little coding exercise? Normally you can just reference the thread and tell everyone what post number you are quoting about. So it looks like this:

From this (http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=322488) thread, WA said in post #11:
Balme me:

which fully assembled, shows as:

From this (http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=322488) thread, WA said in post #11:
Balme me:
or, you can do it the "easy" way to get:

From the Avatars thread:
Blame me:

All of this is useful when quoting someone from either another thread, or in the same thread that has several pages, so idiots like me can see who you are quoting (without having to look, because my memory won't work back across multiple pages) and possibly where you are quoting from (if it's from another thread or many posts back up the line).

Now that I've showed how it works, there is a (sort of) shortcut (did you know I would save this for last?).

When you click on the "reply" button, you are taken to the "Reply to Thread" edit box. If you continue to scroll down past the edit box, you will see the last 25 replies of the thread.

So, if the post (you want to quote) isn't too far back, you can drop below your edit box, and hover your mouse over the name of the person making the post. What you will see, for a few moments, is the actual post number by itself... A little box appears that says "post 1234567". But that requires you to memorize the number or quickly write it down for use in your response.

Of course, that isn't going to work, if your quote is from another thread. Which is why I gave the "long" way to do it in the first place.

[grymster2007]

Thanks Al. I get it now... and your example using WA saying "blame me" is most appropriate :)

On my mighty Macintosh, while in the post reply screen I can scroll down and right-click the user's name, select Properties and that brings up a window that looks like this:

http://www.thefiringline.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=39052&stc=1&d=1228325084

From there I can copy the post # to the clipboard, then paste it into my reply.

I can't remember if Windows would provide the same functionality, but I would think so.

[Al Norris]

I use linux and I do the same thing. When last I used windows (win98se/W2K/XP) it wouldn't do that, so that's why I worded it the way I did.

[Mal H]

Please do any quote testing in the Software Test Area (http://www.thefiringline.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=32).