Since after several reminders about proper quoting and things are still bad, here is a big Quoting for Dummies guide that I wrote which will combine many existing posts from the past as well as some new information.

Before reading this, you're an official dummy. Hopefully, by the end, you'll be smart


*To quote someone's entire post:
Displayed below each post in a topic, there is a 'Reply' button. Pressing this button will allow you to reply to a topic, and have the text from a particular reply quoted in your own reply. If what you want to quote is only some of the post, you may edit out the quotes, just make sure the tags remain intact (explained soon).

*Quoting Multiple Posts:
Sometimes when reading a topic, you see several posts which you want to address. Instead of replying to one, followed by another reply to another post, you're able to quote several posts into one handy reply. Here's how:

When reading through the topic, you'll see at the end of each post:
Hitting the "Reply button will make you reply directly to that post. Hitting the +Quote button will make the button turn red like this:

When the button turns red, that means that that post has been marked for quotation. If you keep reading a thread and find another post you want to reply to, hit the +Quote button until your desired threads are marked for quotation. One of the neat features is that even if you mark a post for quotation and you go the next page of that thread, it'll remember what you marked! If you have three posts you wanted to quote, and they are marked, you can then go ahead and press the reply button found on the bottom of the forum page (circled in red):

This will bring up a posting window that will include the text of all the posts that you selected to quote into one handy post. Again, just make sure the quote tags are all intact (explained later)

For manual quoting (i.e. not clicking on the quote button and/or just quoting bits and pieces of a post), the following is a guide on how to quote correctly. When you put in what appears in this code box: you get the following result:


If you want to get rid of the date and time and just put in who you're quoting, just put in:
This gives you:


The important thing to note is that 'quote' is followed by an '=' and that all tags include what is called open tags and closed tags. '[tag]' is an open tag, and '[/tag]' is a end tag. The obvious difference being the forward slash ('/')

Now that you know how to use the quote tags, lets learn how to not abuse them.

First, please only quote what you will be addressing in your reply. There's no need to quote everything else.
Second, what happens often in a thread is that several people will continue to successivly quote each other, and what ends up happening is something that looks like this (it takes up lots of screen space and it ends up breaking eventually).

This brings me to another point. When there are too many quote tags being used in a post, none of the quote tags work! It's a bug in IPB (forum software), and it will bug you if it happens, so if you need to quote more than four or five times, feel free to reply a second time with some additional quotes.

HOWEVER, do not abuse this. I've seen people have 4-5 posts in a row because they're quoting that many posts. But thats not necessary if you use the method described above to quote multiple posts! So please, try not to reply too many times in a row, rather, see if you can put it all into one post.

Congratulations!! You're no longer a dummy!

Bump.

Quote only the text to which you are referring... You don't need to quote 15 posts! Excess quotes will be edited out and if you're found to be consistently over-quoting you will be BANNED*.

*or maybe just warned... depends.