BleepingComputer.com: Speak Easy Changes

We are reopening the Speak Easy with one minor change. You will no longer be able to quote posts. If you want to respond to what someone wrote, you are going to have to formulate a grammatically correct response. Some of our members decided that it was OK to quote the previous 15 quotes and add a one line response that added nothing to the conversation. That is not going to happen any more. The Speak Easy is for thoughtful debate, and if you can't be thoughtful, don't even bother. Your post will disappear. And before you demand an explanation, forget it. It is what it is. As long as you further the debate in a thoughtful and considerate manner, your post will remain. If you cannot, your post will be removed. If there are any questions, PM me.

How is it, then, that in this Speak Easy thread posts after April 7th are using the "quote post" option?

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic223468.html

Just wonderin'.

JohnWho it is because that topic started out in General Chat I believe, then was moved to The SpeakEasy later on when it got weird. lol

Well, I suppose that makes sense, sort of.



Thanks for the reply.

Actually, John Who, Groovicus is Serious, we all know that and have adapted our Postings accordingly.
That is the way it should be, Mate.

He does Rule this Section.

I know.

So far the new proceedures seem to be working, which is a good thing.

I really was just bringing this to someone's attention in case there was a problem.

A thread being moved here makes perfect sense.

I realise this topic has all but died, but not being able to use quotes is kinda awkward when quoting outside sources...just saying.

Also, if you're going to disable quotes, why is the "quote" button still shown in posts?

Casey

The ability to disable quoting only goes so far as parsing them out when applied in the Speak Easy. It does not extend to actually removing the buttons, although I think with a little coding, that can be accomplished.

The ability to quote is not going to come back because it detracts from the discussion, There is nothing quite like rereading the same posts 15 times over just to get to the new content that pretty much ends up being "I agree". The lack of quoting forces people to address each other specifically, and forces people to engage in actual dialog. I think people have adapted quite nicely, and in the 2 years since the change, less than a handful of people have even commented on it.

Personally I think removing the quote function in the Speak Easy made a HUGE improvement.

If I really need to quote something I just put that section of text in italics.

So is it OK to quote someone and put it in italics and/or quote marks? I certainly see a place for it when responding specifically to a few lines of someone else's argument, but in theory people could still get just as many paragraphs of stuff they didn't write in italics as they could put in a quote tag. What's the spirit of this rule beyond the no BBCode quote tags?
Or was it brought in to address something that doesn't happen any more?

Yes, it's quite alright to quote using italics or preface the content with some sort of identifier of origin. The reason for the quote feature being removed was the fact that people were over using it, and or not editing out irrelevant portions of the quotes when replying. This led to the later replies in a topic being nearly unreadable after the same content had been quoted 35 times with one and two sentence responses. Topics were becoming nearly incomprehensible.