You have probably noticed little tags appearing on your posts about quoting. There are a few reasons why we want to keep quoting blocks of text to a minimum. When it's coming from an outside source, it can violate plagiarism laws. If it's in-site from another TCFL member, then it's adding extra text for members who are accessing the site via mobile devices to scroll through unnecessarily, and for those with slower internet connections to download. Most of all though, our host has a finite amount of space on the server, and TCFL is only getting bigger at a nigh geometric rate. We want to put off deleting the archives as long as possible, and keeping the quoting down to a minimum helps with this.

Now for quoting etiquette. When quoting, you want to make sure of a few things:

1. Your quote tags are complete. When quoting, you're using computer code, and computers are very specific things. If you end up deleting any part of the code, it won't work. It should look like this: See how there's brackets on the beginning and end, and a / on the last part? The / denotes that the quote is ending. Without that, everything after the beginning will be quoted.

2. Quote only what's pertinent. There's no need to waste a ton of space and time by quoting a wall of text when you're responding to one sentence. Also, please do not bold or color-code what you want emphasized within a quote. Just quote what you are replying to.

3. If you're replying directly to a post above you, don't quote. Just hit the "reply" button. If you want to respond to someone's entire post that isn't directly above, simply address your post with their username. Ex: "Suri, I agree with everything you just said. I also want to add..." If the conversation has gotten off-topic and you want to reply to something specific mentioned earlier, quote the idea you want to touch on.

4. Make sure you are quoting the right user. This helps to maintain continuity within threads so we remember who said what. The easiest way to do this is simply to go to the post you want to reply to and hit the "quote" button. For more on how to create and use quote tags, please read the Tech Support Quoting thread.

DON'T

I agree with the bolded part because... blah blah blah

DO

I agree with this because... blah blah blah.

Why take the time to highlight what you need in a pile of unneeded stuff when just getting rid of the unneeded stuff is so much cleaner and easier to read?

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I would have preferred to battle the valiant, but I guess you'll have to do.

DON'T



Agreed because blarghetty blargh blargh.

DO

Stacey,

Agreed because blarghetty blargh blargh.

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"I don't hate kids."
"You don't want to have them."
"I like sports cars, but I don't want to push a Ferrari through my vagina."

Okay, I'm just curious, if you have 3 sentences that you want to quote, but one of them you want to emphasize more than the others, how should that be done? And what do you do when you have one sentence, but wish to emphasize a few words in that sentence? It would make no sense to just quote a few words with no context.

Also (just because I feel like I need to know in general), how does using quote tags from an outside source make it plagiarism? I would think it would be no different than putting the text in between quotation marks. I have no problem with the rule. I just might need to know to mention it on other forums I use.

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You know me, always like to savor that last shot before popping the heatsink.

Good questions! If there's a few sentences and there's a few words you want emphasized, bolding or underlining them would work fine, it's when you yank a couple of paragraphs and you end up bolding/underlining the one section you wanted to bring attention to instead of trimming it down. For instance:


This is overkill, when just this would do:
(not picking on CurlyBlu, just clicked on a random thread and yanked the first post that would work. )

It's a matter of degree. As for plagarism, that too, is a matter of degree. It really doesn't matter if you end up using quotation marks or the quote box, it's how MUCH you take from outside sources that can make it questionable. That, and taking credit for it when you didn't write it. Basically, if there's a whole article on another website that you want to share, putting up a link to it is ok, and posting snippets about it is fine, as is writing ABOUT it. But reposting it in its entirety goes into bad-legal-land. In fact, reposting 50% of it would probably be going too far.

Okay the plagiarism thing makes sense now. I try to not to put too much of an article in a post and I always link it. Mainly my concern was just using the quote tag as opposed to quotation marks because I think that using the quote tag makes it more obvious that the words inside of it are not your own, if that makes sense. Thanks for the explanations.

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You know me, always like to savor that last shot before popping the heatsink.

^ I'm also grateful for this clarification.

Thanks for this - I've always tried to keep my quotes to just the pertinent information I'm replying to - I've sometimes worried others might think it's disrespectful or taking something out of context. Glad to know I should just keep doing this! I also coindentally recently started referring simply to usernames if I'm in general agreement, or something - and it's actually helped me feel a bit more involved. I like how I have to pay attention to who said something, and then I can acknowledge them.

I appreciate this change too - because I have sometimes found those big blocks a bit irritating - since I have hunt for what is actually being referred to!

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"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." - Anais Nin

Danisty and soarshare, thank you for participating in this conversation.

When I was writing the bit on the rules page about avoiding copyright infringement, I did a little research on the "netiquette" of reposting bits of articles from other sites. It seems the generally accepted rule of thumb is to not copy more than 100 words of an article into your reply post. Of course, no one is going to go through and hand count every off-site quote you make, but if you keep it in that ballpark, you'll be fine.

What does "about 100 words" look like? This post.

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I would have preferred to battle the valiant, but I guess you'll have to do.