How to quote when responding to posts

[Laird]

There are three ways to quote from posts when you want to respond to them here on the Psience Quest forum (which runs on the MyBB forum software with plugins). To even be able to respond in the first place though, you need to have registered an account, email-activated that account, had that account activated by an admin (though no action is required on your part here), and then logged in to that account.

The three ways to quote then are to:

1. Quote a single post in its entirety (you can then edit out the bits that you don't want to quote, and/or split the quote up).
   
2. Quote multiple posts in their entirety (again, you can then edit out the bits you don't want to quote, and/or split the quotes up).
   
3. Quote a selection from a single post (you can repeat this to quote multiple selections from multiple posts).
   

Along with the three quoting methods, this how-to also covers these related tasks:

• How to break up a single quote into multiple quotes
  
• How to default to source mode
  
• How to enable the Quick Reply editor
  

Here, with illustrations, is how to do each.

1. How to quote a single post in its entirety

Click the "Reply" button associated with the post, as highlighted in the purple rectangle in this example:



This will open up a new page - a "Post a New Reply" page - with the post quoted in the full editor, as shown here:



If you are now asking yourself "But how do I break up this single quote into multiple quotes so that I can respond to them separately?" then see below.

2. How to quote multiple posts in their entirety

Click the "Quote" button at the bottom of each post that you want to quote. Notice that the green "+" on the button turns to a red "-", as shown in the highlighted purple rectangles in this example:



You can, as implied, deselect posts for quoting by clicking the button again, such that the "-" turns back into a "+", indicating that the post is no longer selected. When there are one or more posts selected for quoting, then, if you scroll down to the "Quick Reply" box, you will see a link with the text "Quote these posts now", as highlighted in the purple rectangle in the following image:



Clicking "Quote these posts now" will then insert the posts as quotations into the "Quick Reply" box on the existing page, that is, without loading a new page, as shown here:



Note that the forum software remembers your selected posts across pages, so you can select posts to quote on one thread page, click on a navigation button ("Previous", "Next", or a page number) to move on to another thread page, and select one or more new posts there without the posts from the previous page being deselected or forgotten. You can do this across as many pages as you would like to - including across different threads.

If you would like to deselect all posts across all pages of all threads, then all you need to do is click the "deselect them" link to the right of the "Quote these posts now" link as highlighted in the image two above.

If, after having clicked "Quote these posts now", you then want to gain access to the full editor, on a new page, then simply click the "Preview Post" button.

And if you then are asking "But how do I break up each of these quotes into separate quotes so that I can respond to them separately?" then again see below.

Or, if you find yourself asking "But where is this Quick Reply editor?!", then see below.

3. How to quote a selection from a single post

First, select the text that you want to quote in the relevant post. Typically, this is done by moving the mouse pointer to the beginning of the text, clicking and holding down the left mouse button, then - whilst keeping the left mouse button held down - moving the mouse pointer to the end of the desired selection, and, once there, releasing the left mouse button.

You should then see a "Reply" button appear close by to the selected text, as highlighted in the purple rectangle in this example - this appeared after the text "some words that somebody might like" was selected:



If you then click this "Reply" button, the selected text will be inserted as a quote into the "Quick Reply" box on the existing page, that is, without loading a new page, as shown here:



You can repeat this process as many times as you like to quote multiple selections, potentially from multiple posts, however, unlike in scenario #2 above, you can't do this across thread pages - the quotes must all be on the same thread page.

As for scenario #2 above: if you then want to gain access to the full editor, on a new page, then simply click the "Preview Post" button.

And, again as for scenario #2 above, if you find yourself asking "But where is this Quick Reply editor?!", then see below.

How to break up a single quote into multiple quotes

Let's say that you've chosen the first approach, and you have in your full editor on the "Post a New Reply" page the full quote of "A random member" as in the screenshot above. You want to reply to each of the two sentences separately, but there doesn't seem to be a way to break up the quote: when you move the editing cursor in between the two sentences and press Enter, all that happens is that an empty line is inserted within the quote, without breaking it up.

This is, admittedly, an awkward feature (or lack thereof) of the rich text editor used by MyBB. The way to work around it is a little cumbersome, but it does work just fine. The first step is to switch out of the editor's rich text mode and into its "source" mode, by clicking the "View source" button: the button that looks like a little white page with its top right corner folded over, highlighted in a purple rectangle in this screenshot:



Now, you will see the underlying source for the quote: two "quote" tags, one of which is an opening tag, and one of which is a closing tag, and both of which are highlighted in the purple rectangles in this example:



The opening tag is the square-bracket enclosed word "quote" with various attributes including the author of the quoted post (='A random member'), the ID of the quoted post (pid='21730') and the time (as a UNIX timestamp) at which the quoted post was posted (dateline='1552016650').

The closing tag is also a square-bracket enclosed "quote", but this time with a forward slash preceding it.

So, to split up the single quote into two separate quotes so that you can respond individually to each, simply copy the opening and closing quote tags such that an opening tag begins each selection to which you want to respond individually, and a corresponding closing tag ends it, as shown here:



If you then click the "View source" button again to return to rich text editing, you will see that you now have two separate quotations to which you can respond individually (but you don't have to return to rich text editing - you can stay in source mode if you prefer):



How to default to source mode

If you find yourself splitting up quotes in this way regularly, and find it inconvenient to have to click the "View source" button every time to get into source mode so as to do that, then you can choose to make source mode the default:

In the User CP, click (in the left sidebar) Edit Options, and on the page that comes up, under the "Other Options" subheading, check the "Put the editor in source mode by default" checkbox and then click the "Update Options" button, as highlighted in this screenshot:



Unfortunately, this has the side-effect of setting the focus to the Quick Reply editor whenever a thread page is first loaded, which can be pretty inconvenient in itself.

How to enable the Quick Reply editor

If, when viewing a thread page, you don't see the Quick Reply editor at the bottom of the page, as shown in the images above (this one, this one, and this one), then you might need to edit your settings:

As in the section above, in the User CP, click (in the left sidebar) Edit Options, but this time on the page that comes up, under the "Thread View Options" subheading, check the "Show the quick reply box on the view thread page" checkbox and then as before click the "Update Options" button, all as highlighted in this screenshot:



And hopefully that covers all of your quoting needs here on Psience Quest - but if you do have any questions, then please feel free to ask.