Question: Why is there no "Quote reply/post" feature on PoFo?

Answer: The feature to quote an entire post with the click of a button was removed from PoFo on 25 October 2004. It was removed for the following reasons:

• Many users on the board were quoting the entire posts even if they were very long or were large articles and then responding with only one or two lines.
• There was a large amount of quoting entire posts including existing quotes of previous entire posts within them, leading to horrible 'quote tunnels'.

The result of the above two points were:

• Lazy formatting (or in most cases no formatting) of quoted material made threads extremely long requiring lots of scrolling to read comparatively little text. Threads were difficult to read.
• Lack of any selective quoting reduced the usefulness of quoting at all since there was no indication of what a user was referring to.
• It led to masses of unnecessary text that:
  • Made pages take longer for users to download.
  • Wasted masses of the website's bandwidth.
  • Made the database grow much faster and become far larger than it need to be.
  • Generally made the site slower because the server had more to do.

After removal of the "quote reply" feature these problems were eradicated overnight. The only negative was that when quoting 'manually' the inherent laziness of users meant a lack of information being included about who posted the material they were quoting.

Named quotes can be inserted into posts with the following code:

[quote="Joe Blogs"]blurb[/quote]

There was a poll conducted of users before the feature was removed to ask users' opinion on the matter. The poll results were about 50:50 until the feature was removed. After the feature was removed more votes were cast against its removal. However, that was likely due to those that missed the feature continuing to add their votes, whilst those that did not use the feature, didn't care or did not want it but saw that it had already been removed did not bother to register an opinion.

Given the present size of the database, the forum will not be re-adding this resource-wasting feature since it is not used responsibly by users. Selective quoting (which is how quoting should always be conducted) is still possible using BBcode.