[Evan Thomas]

Originally Posted by peetzakilla

I agree with the what Mike said and I think the current system works just fine. The only people who REALLY need to know who is responsible for the quoted text are the original writer and the quoter. It doesn't really matter to everyone else exactly who said it, at least the vast majority of the time.

Yes, I'd rather have the current system than one in which everyone hits a "just-quote-everything" button... that's a hideous waste of bandwidth.

But I agree with Nate45 about attribution, especially in the absence of that button: people often quote one or two sentences from a longer post, and one sometimes would like to know the context. Attribution makes the quoted post easier to find. I noticed an even nicer touch this morning: Fiddletown, in commenting on something I'd said in an earlier post, did this:

Originally Posted by fiddletown

That's very helpful if someone wants to read the quoted post in its entirety, especially in a thread with many pages.

And as Nate45 pointed out, for the attributionally obsessed, it's also possible to link to the quoted post:

Originally Posted by fiddletown, post 103

For detailed instructions on how to do this and all sorts of other fun attribution-y things, see this post by Antipitas, in the "How do I quote from a post?" sticky, at the top of this forum...