Sometimes it's beneficial, perhaps almost necessary, to quote a specfic section from a previous posting to serve as a reference point for one's reply.  Many people find using the "quote" feature the easiest way to do this. Unfortunately, as a general rule (unless it's used judiciously, which is seldom the case) it's just the laziest, most wasteful, annoying and ridiculous way. You can find instance after instance where someone "quotes" 50 lines or more, or "quotes" nested quotes of improbable sizes just to reference one single statement.  Well, not only does this negate the purpose of the "quote" feature, it disrespects the fellow members who may be trying to follow the thread, wastes resources with nonsense, lessens the enjoyment and reveals something about the poster. 

I propose the hopefully simple solution, if it is possible (I know nothing about programming), that a severe limit be installed on the "Quote" feature of, say, a few lines, or so many (250?) characters. Perhaps, when you click on Quote, the entire posting would be displayed in the preview box, but if it wasn't edited down to X number of characters (and I suggest a very limited amount), it would give a "quote too long" error message when submitted.

This would force people not to subject others to the annoyance of their laziness.

I second that motion.

It's very annoying to say the least and it occurs in almost every thread. EVERY THREAD!

...

There are also a few characters that do this on purpose just to leave a dinky and off-topic response. 

A fix or this would be nice. A flag button wouldnt be so bad either.

 I agree... (apologies, I could not resist)

I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to give users the ability to highlight a section of text, and then quote just that selection via a right click drop-down (similar to how the spell check works, although obviously far more proprietary).

Another idea that I've thrown out in the past is to make the nested quotes collapsible and to have all but the most recent one being quoted (i.e. the post in which the "Quote" link was clicked) collapsed by default to preserve screen space and the the readability of threads while still allowing users to see the preceding conversation by expanding the collapsed sections.

On the other hand, people can click the quote button and then delete the irrelevant bits from their posting. However, that might be too complicated.

Yes, that generally the way I do it (being sure to use ellipses to indicate that text has been removed), but it's clearly not being done by everyone and I think that Batgirl's assessment of laziness is one of the underlying reasons.  Making it easier for users to better focus their quotes would hopefully pander to this laziness while helping to mitigate the problem.

Well, to me, there seems to be absolutely no argument for having the ability to quote in a super large capacity and a ton of arguments against it.  Editing is so easy and quick. Actually, rather than as it stands now, I'd 1000x prefer to see the entire function disabled. But a limited function would be better.

Well, sometimes I want to quote most of the points someone is saying in a long post, but may leave out a few sentences with no response. I don't consider it lazy not to cherry pick each sentnece I'm replying to. But yes if there is a key passage then it makes sense to only quote that part. But I don't really find it annoying either way unless a long post is quoted many times which is rare.

I guess I'm one of the people You're referring to. That it could be considered annoying and a waste of resources to not edit a quote honestly never entered my mind, but I definitely will do when necessary in future. But still I do like to quote people even when it doesn't seem necessary, because I've seen enough instances where people either leave the site (their comments disappear with them rather unnecessarily I think), or delete their comments and the whole conversation then doesn't make a lot of sense if most people haven't quoted them.

That is true, but probably not worth the annoyance of too many quotes. If you don't know what's going on in a topic then you can just go to another one of thousands of other current topics.

True.

This is another issue entirely -- a user's content shouldn't disappear just because the user has.

Even more needed is a way of taking multiple quotes/parts from one post, replying to all of them in your reply, and having the system automatically mark/label the quoted parts.

At the moment you can only cut/paste multiple parts and put them in a different colour or something like that to show they are not your text but someone else's.

Yeah, there should just be some kind of mark that lets you know it's a deleted member.

I'll put in a request to change this! 

The quotes are just a point of reference for what the contributor has made to the forum. Quotes should be open to usage, and they will be used especially if a line of relevance is tied in to the topic.

I've been doing that on my blog for ages. It's too easy to lose the plot (and to lose readers, for that matter) if the nitty gritty is hidden amongst all the extraneous rubbish.

The problem with doing it that way is that it can be a bit time-consuming.

If it could be programmed in, the idea of highlighting the section you want to quote and having only that displayed would be great. Alternatively we can continue to use the quote button and delete the bits we don't need, as I did with this one.

If it could be programmed in, the idea of highlighting the section you want to quote and having only that displayed would be great.

No programming needed.  :)

(nor could I)