Site design ... a pet peave ...

[Psi*]

... sort of?

When commenting to a thread the "quote" button is more readily apparent to hit than "new reply". I find it mildly annoying that many people quote the message immediately beneath theirs not to mention a "From our front-page news:" and eventually you find their words of wisdom.

I think this is a fairly low volume site so bandwidth isn't really a big deal, but I have seen sites where this is very common and you have miles of postings to scroll thru with much of it repeated ... sort of just take me to the last message & that is the whole thread.

So, I have thought "why is this"? In a nut shell, I think it is the layout of the message frame. When one gets to the bottom of the message what is seen is "quote". All the way back up at the top of the message is "new reply". Anyone familiar and who cares will go that extra mile scroll back to the top for "reply". Otherwise, you get "quote" ... Not to mention that "new reply" is sort of confusing if not redundant? How about just "reply"? I feel vaguely like Andy Rooney at the moment.

Maybe the "quote" & "new reply" could be swapped to test this theory? Or, add a "reply" button next to "quote"? Personally, I think the swap would work better.

 

[Rob Williams]

I'll have to disagree and say that I think the current organization is fine as is (the organization is almost identical for all forums that run vBulletin). I do agree, though, that it's rather needless to quote entire posts, and especially news posts.

The structure works like this. There are two main options for people... a "New Reply" button at both the top and bottom of the thread, and also a "Quick Reply" box at the bottom (this might depend on settings). The quote is located where it is because it's inside each post. You know if you click that button, you're going to quote what the person in that post said. But because when you reply to a thread, you aren't necessarily looking to quote someone, those buttons are located outside of the entire thread. This layout just makes sense.

One option would be to move the buttons over to the left, but I am not sure it's necessary. They've always been located to the right, and not to mention ALL forums I've ever been to have had them in the same spot. I'm not sure it's wise to change things up and mess with people's rhythm (namely mine ).

 

[2Tired2Tango]

... sort of?
When commenting to a thread the "quote" button is more readily apparent to hit than "new reply". I find it mildly annoying that many people quote the message immediately beneath theirs not to mention a "From our front-page news:" and eventually you find their words of wisdom.

With apologies I have to take Rob's side in this one. The button layout makes enough sense as it is....

But the reasons for quoting one's correspondent is perhaps a bit less obvious...

Before the internet there was FidoNet. (no, not the phone company) This was roughly the equivalent of Email and Usenet and most often it was hooked into BBS systems that would be the equivalent of Forums and FTP. In fact a lot of the internet's working concepts came from FidoNet.

One concept that came from FidoNet the internet could have done very well without is "Trolling"

Back then messages were plain... like many of the "unquoted" messages on this forum.... which is fine when everybody plays fair. However not everyone was playing fair, many would say things then, with messages aged off the boards, they would deny saying them. Many a huge fracas on FidoNet's discussion groups came from this simple tactic: attack...wait 3 days... deny. Enough people would either not recall or not have seen the first message that it worked almost every time... You wanna see a bunch of people go ballistic... attack, wait 3 days, deny...

So a group of us decided enough was enough and I cooked up a TSR (yes, in DOS!) that would grab the message, quote it by placing > signs at the beginning of each line and then insert it into the message editor... Thus "reminding" the person of their own words... effectively making it impossible for them to deny saying them. This I uploaded to a local BBS for people to use ... causing an immediate uproar as all of a sudden several of the most clever and popular posters was being exposed for the duplicitous games they were playing...

Shortly after that someone introduced a full message editor for FidoNet that included the quoting feature, then the BBS systems began updating with quoting features...

The point wasn't so much to remind people what's been said... it' was to keep them honest by handing them proof they said it.

Of course there was an almost immediate reaction with the creation of the "Sockpuppet". If you can't say it yourself, have someone else say it for you...

Sometimes you just can't win.

Fast forward to today... Get on a busy forum and try to keep track of overlapping conversations without the quoting feature... it provides context, it keeps people honest and it saves you a ton of time having to look up the preceding message every time you forget what was said last.

So, yes, there is good reason to quote messages, forcing you to weed through the stuff at the top of the message to get to the new pearls of wisdom at the bottom...

 

[Psi*]

Ok, I respect your experience & opinions. I do remember some of the evolution but only as a semi-attentive user and never fielding those who always have an opinion to lay out. I felt like whining.

I visit a couple of car forums and they have no shortage of opinions. Never mind that many of those "experts" don't know which end of a Crescent wrench is the business end. Excess quoting is rampant causing threads to quickly run over 20 pages at which point they usually stifle themselves ... "can't find the forest for trees", I think.

hahaha ... you said "TSR"!!! OMG. It took me a couple minutes.

BBS's, those were the days. I must have had a dozen viruses from downloads on my computer at one point.