Would nested quoting be helpful to you?
 

Continuing on from the third quoted block from this post, would members find it helpful or unhelpful if the LQ 'quote' button would include nested quotes (the quoted material in the post being quoted) or another button that would provide this feature in addition to the normal 'quote' button which strips previously quoted material?

It can be worked around manually (and I often do), so I may be alone in this, but it'd be handy to me.

Definitely yes. I know that PCWorld Forums had it and it really worked.

Eh, I've seen this in the xkcd forums, and to me it just seems annoying. Why bother reading a bunch of repeated nested quotes when you pretty much know that the next person is responding to what was last said?

Example (nested):

This could be simplified to:

Wait a minute, your viewpoint here is false because of a), b), and c).

...assuming "a different some other guy" is responding to "some other guy", which as far as I've seen is often the case.

I think I agree with MrCode. It can look a mess if it goes three deep or more.

So you both disagree with even having an option to 'full quote' in addition to 'quote'? And it's no different than email or usenet - standard clients like mutt and slrn provide full quotes if you opt to quote at all. If the quoting is irrelevant or too deep, netiquette has you trim the quotes. I'd find it easier to trim on occasion than to insert quotes. Also, many clients provide automatic quote folding - perhaps LQ could default to exposing one level of quoting and you could click on an item to expand all the quotes.

That implies one knows about proper netiquette like no top-posting, not quoting what one won't reply to. And I'm sorry to say but even people who've used the 'net longer than I have trouble understanding those basic rules, let alone new 'uns who probably never heard of netiquette. So that's a "no" from me too but thanks for offering the idea. BTW I have used nested quoting on LQ, but rarely, in the range of per year < 10 times.

I know I would really like this feature. Most of the quoting I do in large threads needs one nested quote in order for it to be relevant.
Example: User A says something. User B quotes them and makes an assumption. User C (me) quotes User B, and provides clarification.
If it's possible to "Cap" how many levels of quoting are done, then I think it's a great idea. Even if it's not, I don't think there will be too many "XKCD forum" examples running around here.

Doubt I'd use it, but it might be useful. Maybe if the default was the current system, but one could use nested quotes in advanced mode by choice, then perhaps the objections above would be lessened. I'm not sure how that would work, it's just a notion.

unSpawn: true enough about new users. They have to learn sometime, though. ;)

mostlyharmless: yep, something like that sounds good to me, or like xeleema says - it's probably just that first level of nesting that would be really handy and just to get that in would be good.

Well, it looks like I'm losing but it's nice to know from xeleema and Kenny_Strawn that it's not just me. :)

Winning, losing, just wait for more opinions I'd say. Just like the song says: make, a difference, a day can.

I answered Yes to the poll, because I was answering the literal question:

Would nested quoting be helpful to you?

I've answered several posts where the OP puts code or other external content in QUOTE tags instead of CODE tags. Quoting part of that external content is necessary to making a understandable response, so I need to manually copy that into the reply.

On occasion, I also want to use true nested quoting, which I also do by manual copying.

Deleting what I don't want in a quote is enough easier than copying what I do want, that automatic nested quoting would be helpful to me.

The better question is whether it would be good for the forum. Too many people quote the entire post when replying. More should be done to discourage that. If there is no practical way to discourage that wrong behavior, then automatic nested quoting would do the forum more harm than good.

So I would suggest it as a setting in user options, with the default set to not quote quotes. Users who are too lazy to delete the right parts of a quote probably wouldn't go into their options and change that setting from the default.

Definitely NO!
It`ll be a mess. I will have to edit this every time. It won`t be helpful to me.

That's an excellent idea. A lot of this is theoretical in that I don't know how easy it would be to implement but, theoretically, I think this would address everyone's problems. The system would be unchanged by default but those who wanted could access it. I still like the idea of side-by-side 'quote'/'quote full' buttons, but I also like this idea.

unSpawn: thanks for the encouragement. :)

Couldn't resist :)

Sorry I can't be as supportive of your idea as you were of mine. I think the side-by-side buttons would invite abuse by all the people who currently quote full posts out of either laziness or misunderstanding of netiquette.

I see what you're saying. I hadn't thought of that. Certain users might think 'Full quote? Full is more and more is better, right? I'll click that one.' I was just assuming they'd know to pick which one they needed. So, yeah, your idea is better.

Oh, a user-preference! That would be nice!
Darn it, I already voted once, too.

It's useful when the quotes are from a several posts back or a different thread or long threads.

Yes, there can be abuse where users quote a whole post which is -1 or -2 posts up, and add just one line as response. This doesn't happen as much on LQ as on other sites but it can & does. So on LQ, it would be useful.

Another useful option: multi-quote. You select which posts you want to quote and then click 'quote'. Result is a series of quotes which aren't nested.