Suggestion Thoughts on Quoting from Outside Resources

[boulderjohn]

It is very common to quote from outside resources in posts. These include news articles, blog entries, DAN articles--just about anything you can use the familiar copy/paste function to reproduce in support of a post. Pretty much everyone does it the same way. They put the tag QUOTE and /QUOTE tags at the beginning and end of the quoted material. As the remainder of this sentence demonstrates,

this makes it very clear that the material is being quoted from an original source.

Although this works just fine most of the time, I have lately been using a different technique in order to avoid a problem that this can create for people who may want to respond to that quoted material. The problem with that technique is that if someone wants to respond to all or a portion of that quote and uses the Reply with Quote feature, the quoted material is lost. That means the responder has to go to the trouble of copy/pasting that material all over again.

What I do instead is paste the material in and then use the indent feature (by the bulleted list button) to set the quote off. (You may have to use the Go Advanced feature to get that.) I sometimes change the text to dark blue as well to make it even more clear. The advantage of it is that if someone uses the Reply with Quote feature, the quoted material is reproduced. Another advantage is that it is actually easier and takes less time than putting in the quote tags.

Here is what it looks like.​

 

[knotical]

Interesting option, but I'm not sure it's faster or easier.
Instead of manually adding quote tags, one can simply highlight the material then click on the cartoon quote balloon - next to the insert video icon. Also, the balloon is available when using quick reply, but the indent feature isn't.