How to format quotes in your posts...

I've noticed a few people asking about this lately, and thought perhaps I'd make a post on it. I figured this was the best place to post it, since most of the people asking are relatively new to ATS.

If you want to know the "easiest" way to break your quote-replies into multiple parts, within the same post, here's 10 easy steps.

1.) Open up notepad.

2.) Click "Quote" besides the first post you want to quote from.

3.) Copy and paste the whole thing into notepad.

4.) Say you end up with something like this... (using round brackets instead of square brackets so you can see what the code looks like).


(quote)(i)Originally posted by thelibra(/i)
Blahblahblahblahblah
blahblahblahblahblah

"Meh Meh?" Mehmeh meh Meh. Meh!
(/quote)


5.) Now say you want to respond to the "blahblah" sepereate from the "meh". Just kick a bit of space between them, highlight the line that references the quote, copy, and paste, then make sure that both quote tag references are closed off with the end-tag. It should now look like this...

(quote)(i)Originally posted by thelibra(/i)
Blahblahblahblahblah
blahblahblahblahblah
(/quote)

(quote)(i)Originally posted by thelibra(/i)
"Meh Meh?" Mehmeh meh Meh. Meh!
(/quote)

6.) You can then just type your response after each quote and that way break your post up into seperate replies, and simply delete the sections you don't really need to reply to. Typically I'll try and just quote the most relevant phrase to the "idea" I'm responding to as a reference point, unless it's something really complex, or a series of dialogue needed for context.

7.) Now, say you had like 5 people you want to respond to in one post. It works the same way, just click over to ATS, hit the back button, find the next person you want to quote, copy and paste their response into notepad at the end of your previous responses, and do the same thing for each person.

8.) When you're done, just copy and paste the response back into a reply window on ATS and Bob's your uncle.

9.) Play around with BBCode a bit. Sometimes I'll just start bogus posts I never actualy submit, I just "Preview" so I can see what's possible with BBCode. The buttons will insert pre-generated code for you, but there's actually a lot possible on the board, and you can also re-arrange the code to format posts quite professionally, like bulleted lists and such.

10.) The biggest advantage of always composing your post in notepad first is that if ATS craps out when you try to submit your post, you didn't just lose all that work, you just have to copy and paste it again.


One last thing, if you "save" your notepad file, close, and re-open it, you'll have to re-format some of your line breaks before posting it. That can be a huge pain, but is still better than losing hours worth of typing (yeah, sometimes I've put hours or even days into one single post).



(edits for spelling and clarity)

[edit on 3/9/2007 by thelibra]

I tried to reply to your u2u, but I don't have enough posts yet. I didn't feel that it was right to post meaninglessly just to get enough points. I did however want to let you know how helpful this info was.Thank you very much for your help! I do apologize that I did not quote you correctly in our last meeting, denying you the credit for your thoughts. Now that I've learned from your enlightening info, it (hopefully) won't happen again. For my next trick...I'm trying smileys. It just doesn't seem to be working out so well.

so I was wrong...it did work
(edit for ignorance)

[edit on 3/10/2007 by bjshobbes]

Originally posted by bjshobbes
I did however want to let you know how helpful this info was.Thank you very much for your help! I do apologize that I did not quote you correctly in our last meeting, denying you the credit for your thoughts.

No worries, friend. I took no offense at all, learning the ins and outs off bbcode can be very tricky, and something like formatting problems are certainly nothing to get upset about. I'm just pleased as punch to see someone so polite wanting to learn more about it.

There's a guide called Zedd's Guide of Doom or something like that, I can never remember where it is, but a lot of mods have the link in their sig. It's kind of like an illustrated user's manual to ATS.

Zedd's Handbook

reply to post by enjoies05


link doesn't work