cristo said:
Personally, i think such a feature would make the forums untidy. We'll end up with posts having upwards of three layers of quotes meaning we'll have to scroll down half a page to read the new content. I don't think this is something that is necessary, since if one wishes to read the post which is replied to in the quote, one can simply scroll up to the appropriate post. In the odd case where it is necessary to have, say, two layers of quote in a reply, one can put these in manually.
Yes, this is the reason we don't have embedded quotes. Especially novices leave all the embedded quotes (and deleting them out manually makes more chances to introduce errors to what was quoted).
Fredrik said:
The problem is that people don't do that. Yes, I do that, but the people who would need it the most don't. I have many times gotten into ridiculous arguments with people who completely lost track of what we were talking about at some point. I think unnecessary arguments like that is a bigger problem than people who would use nested quotes when it isn't necessary.
I disagree. If someone has lost track of the argument and can't refer back a bit to get back on track, that's their problem. Nested quotes get annoying very quickly.
Also, aren't people already pretty good at deleting irrelevant stuff from the texts they're quoting?
Take a look at any forum that includes the nested quotes, and draw your own conclusion.
You're only supposed to use nested quotes when there's something relevant in the quote inside the quote. Most of the time you would just delete it. I think people are actually better at deleting irrelevant stuff from quotes than they are at realizing when they should go back and read a previous post.
I disagree. And, if the previously quoted content is really relevant, use the multi quote feature to preserve both of the quoted sections. If it's that important, it's worth the extra step of finding the originally quoted post and quoting that with the one you're replying to. In case you didn't know, the multi quote button works across multiple pages of a thread, so you can go back a page, click multi quote, go to the next page, click again for some other post, and when you're done with everything you want to quote, click the regular quote button.
As for people needing more than 30 min to edit, if one is making that many errors or that large of errors when posting to need so much time to go back and fix them, they really should spend more time either proofreading in the preview panel or composing offline, or perhaps simply thinking about what they're writing before they hit "submit." Sure, on a rare occasion, someone will realize an error later on (like a link that points to the wrong place), but that's easily remedied with a note of correction later in the thread, or by asking a mentor to fix the problem. If it's more than a really rare problem or minor typos, then spend more time thinking before sending.
Ok, well maybe if it were possible, then the ME forum could have a longer edit period, we'd have to ask russ or berkeman if they'd object to it. In the meantime, you can use either of Evo's suggested workarounds.
