FineTunedMac members:
I've noticed that some posters seem to be routinely hitting the Quote button to respond to a post in situations in which the Reply button would be more appropriate. If you are replying to a specific point, then quoting a portion of the post in question to establish the context for your own point makes sense. Quoting the entirety of the post in question does not—especially when, as is increasingly the case, the post being quoted already contains quoting of a previous post, which itself may even include a still prior post...
If you are not replying to a specific point but are rather making a general reply, then what purpose is served by quoting the entire post you're replying to? My suspicion is that folks hit the Quote button as a lazy way of making clear which post they're replying to. But really, are we such poor readers that we can't figure that out 95% of the time simply by looking at the [Re: ]? And even on that one occasion out of 20 in which it might not be immediately obvious which of several posts by the same author a given [Re: ] is a reply to, the content of the post itself usually makes that clear.
I have a couple of concerns here. First, the quotes-within-quotes tangle, which necessarily arises with ever-greater frequency the more folks adopt the habit of hitting Quote when they're really just Replying, quickly becomes more difficult to follow than simple first-person descriptive writing. With multiply-nested quotes I sometimes find myself having to look to the left of the post to see whose post I'm actually reading. (Imagine listening to a conversation in which each participant prefaced his or her every remark by first repeating the preceding remark.)
Second, the multiple recurrences of particular passages in the same thread interferes with searching, both within the forums—in which a particular word or phrase might reverberate in the form of dozens of results, only one of which was actually original exposition—and from outside the forums, in which particular threads might rank high in the list of hits due not to relevance, but to repetitiveness. If part of our purpose is to provide a resource for the greater community, it behooves us to consider the accessibility of whatever useful information we generate in these threads. (This is also a major reason that taking a troubleshooting thread way off-topic is discouraged: it's not helpful to folks searching for help in the future. But that's a different thread...)
If I get the chance, I'll supplement this post with some concrete examples of what I'm talking about. But in the meantime, it would be nice if folks would give a little bit of thought to what they're trying to accomplish when using the quote button. Thanks.
