While we're on the subject of Quoting within a post, let's cover it in a bit more detail.
As mentioned above, it's best to only quote the relevant portions of a previous post. In other words, it's generally considered bad form to quote 200 lines of text only to add "Me too!" or some similarly short reply.
Having determined that trimming down a quote is often desirable, let's cover how to do it properly.
1. Click the quote bottun below the post (
![Image](http://www.beechtalk.com/forums/styles/BeechTalkStyle/imageset/en/icon_post_quote.gif)
)
2. You will see something that looks like the following:Code:
[quote="John Smith"]This is the first line of quoted text.
Here is the second line of the quote.[/quote]
3. Trim the quote but you *must* leave both the beginning tag Code:
[quote="John Smith"]
and ending tag Code:
[/quote]
completely untouched. Note in particular that all the brackets
[ and
] are important, and the ending tag has a
/ which also must be there to display the quote properly. In short,
edit only the text between the two quote tags and your quote will come out perfectly.
As an example, here's how it would look after I removed the second line of the quote above:
Code:
[quote="John Smith"]This is the first line of quoted text.[/quote]
And here's how it shows up inside of your post:
Username Protected wrote:
This is the first line of quoted text.
Here's how it would look if I messed up one of those tags:
[quote="John Smith"This is the first line of quoted text.[quote]
There are two errors with the above quote. The beginning tag is missing the
] after Smith and the ending tag is missing the
/. Fix those two problems and it will appear as it does above.
And remember, if you mess up a quote, you can always immediately edit your post and fix it. Only takes a second and it will certainly be a lot more clear to the readers of your post.
Hope this helps, let us know if you have questions about it in Back Talk!