"Quoting is annoying"

[Jairo]

In these last months, I received complains about using quotes in different orkut forums.

I find them useful, and they are so common that some forum systems even have buttons for it. But to my surprise, many orkut users never heard about it and even become infuriated with it.

Have you seen this kind of "netiquette" elsewhere?

[LunarOrbit]

I've never heard of anyone being annoyed by quoting before.

I'm not familiar with how Orkut does things because I've never used it. Are they complaining about the method Orkut uses to quote people, or the fact that you are quoting others?

People here might not like the method of quoting in this forum (some people here use the bold tags instead), but quoting other people in and of itself does not seem to bother anyone.

[gillianren]

What, using the "quote" button? The one forum I participated in which didn't have it got a lot of complaints until it did.

[BertL]

The only thing I would personally find annoying if somebody quotes a very lengthy posts to only respond to a few points in it. I favor selective quoting (by which I mean quoting a couple of key sentences) over unnecessarily long quotes. This is how the netiquette regarding quotations on most forums I frequently visit seems to work. Quoting a post to respond to it with a short response like "Yeah", "Right" or "kwl" is regarded as negative in most cases though (I must say that it depends on the overall maturity the forum is trying to show).

[gillianren]

Frankly, I'm not a fan of people whose only response is "yeah" or "right" in the first place, and don't get me started on "kwl" or "kewl" or any other deliberate misspelling.

[LunarOrbit]

You'd be happy to know, Gillianren, that even when I send text messages from my phone I try to use proper spelling and punctuation.

[laurel]

Quoting someone out of context is annoying, obviously, and there are some sites like BAUT that specifically warn against it. And I agree with BertL about the unnecessarily long quotes. I try not to quote more of a post than necessary. But otherwise, no, I don't think quoting is annoying.

[Jason]

All too often I find it difficult to tell who a poster is responding to if they don't quote from the post they are responding to. Quoting is a great help in this regard.

[gillianren]

Jul 26, 2010 15:43:46 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

You'd be happy to know, Gillianren, that even when I send text messages from my phone I try to use proper spelling and punctuation.

Thank you! Actually, one of the things I like about some of my younger relatives (none of whom I've seen since the '90s but several of whom I've hooked up with again on Facebook, not that we have anything to say to one another) is that, even on Facebook, they write clear prose with proper spelling.

[LunarOrbit]

I can sort of understand shortening words for text messages because cellphone keypads are horrible for typing long messages, and you don't to spend a lot of time texting. But for online forums or Facebook time isn't as big an issue and keyboard layouts are more comfortable.

[Jairo]

Jul 26, 2010 13:50:25 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

People here might not like the method of quoting in this forum (some people here use the bold tags instead), but quoting other people in and of itself does not seem to bother anyone.

I use this Jay-style bold quoting in orkut. Its forum system is primitive and doesn't have quoting funcions. But it bothers people anyway...

[BertL]

Perhaps a note at the top of your post saying (Note: things in bold tags in my post are quotations.), or something.

[lukepemberton]

Jay uses bold, both when in forums and on Clavius. I think that is useful as it distinguishes between Jay's writing and the writing he is addressing. Quotes and using bold type are far from annoying, they provide context.