Administrivia: A few suggestions while learning the ropes

[BD]

Several of us staff members have been deleting duplicate posts and moving replies from inside the 'quote' box to outside. We don't usually have time to PM the poster invovled, so we just fix the easy stuff.

What I'd like to ask everyone to do is to please check a thread after you've posted, to make sure things look the way you intended them to. If you've posted the same thing twice, or you've quoted somebody else's post but not added any new material, or your reply is inside the quote box (so it isn't very clear what part of the text is the OP and what part is the reply), then you have 60 minutes to correct the problem yourself.

Your options, within those 60 minutes, are:

1. You may delete your post completely (appropriate if you accidentally posted the same thing twice), or

2. You may edit your post to correct whatever's messed up.

If it's more than 60 minutes after you've posted, and you want to correct a post, you can use the "Report Post" feature to request assistance form a staff member. This is actually better than PM-ing a staffer, because the "Report Post" feature signals all staff members at the same time, and the first one that sees it can take action and then retire the report. With a PM, only the staffer(s) you PM will see the request.

If everyone takes a few seconds to verify that your post came out right, that will save the staff some time and also benefit everyone on the board who won't have to deal with the broken posts.

Thanks!

[BD]

Oh, by the way: you "Report" a post by clicking the little "gear" icon over on the right within a post, and selecting "Report Post".

[dreamboatcruise]

60 minutes or 60 seconds? If it is supposed to be 60 minutes, that is not working correctly for me.

Perhaps the that time limit has changed recently, but I tried some days ago changing a post within minutes and it said it was too late.

[zieg]

On the thread called Patent question, same thing happened. I'm trying to delete the multiple posts. Every time I go in to edit, it copies the post.

[BD]

zieg, I think you may have pressed "Quote" instead of "Edit", from the looks of that post you were trying to delete but couldn't (and that liane later deleted.)

After you pressed "Quote", I'm thinking you then actually posted that, and it created a new post with nothing but the old post "quoted". Sound plausible?

[BD]

And by the way, if you were trying to delete it, why would you have tried to "Edit" it? That's not how you delete. You go to the little cog pull-down on the right side of the existing post, and select "Delete Post".

[BD]

Aug 14, 2014 18:30:32 GMT -5 dreamboatcruise said:

60 minutes or 60 seconds? If it is supposed to be 60 minutes, that is not working correctly for me.

Perhaps the that time limit has changed recently, but I tried some days ago changing a post within minutes and it said it was too late.

definitely 60 minutes. Please try it yourself on the "Test board" (see it near the bottom of the home page). Let me know what happens. Give it 5 minutes or so, and see if you can delete it.

[dreamboatcruise]

This time it worked after 10 minutes. However, there absolutely have been at least a couple of times when it didn't. It wouldn't even wait for me to click on edit. As soon as the cursor went over edit, a dialog would appear saying it was too late, and the edit button would disappear. That would happen within a few minutes of having posted. Perhaps there is simply some bug that only manifests itself when Mars and Jupiter are aligned.

[BD]

dream, that's probably a bug. I've updated the plug-in that controls this feature, from 1.0.4 to 1.0.8; hopefully, this issue will just go away. If you (or anyone) sees a "Too late!" message when you attempt to edit or delete a post before the 60 minute deadline, please PM me.

Thanks for bearing with our technical difficulties!

[liane]

I just wanted to reiterate the proper way of using the "Quote" feature.

From the post you want to quote, hit the "Quote" button in the upper right-hand corner.

The post will come up in a quote box, and you are now in reply mode.

At this point, you can delete out extraneous portions of the the quote, to keep it shorter.

As for your reply, please make sure this goes under the quote box but still within the reply box.

With all the new members, we've been editing a fair number of posts to maintain clarity. This sometimes takes a bit of time when the quoted post is a ways back and needs to be checked first.

Thanks!

[BD]

Thanks, liane.

And yet one more suggestion: if the post you're replying to is currently the last post in the thread, please don't bother quoting it unless it wouldn't otherwise be clear what part of the post you're replying to...

[mnholdem]

I think Pro Board newbies should be made aware that, although a response should be written outside the quote box, one can also go into the quote to delete everything except the words you want to quote. You do not need to keep the boxed quote in its entirety, as some of them can be quite lengthy.

NOTE: I discovered that I need to type just a few letters below the quote box FIRST before editing the quote. Otherwise line space below the quote box disappears and I cannot type in my reply.

[BD]

Aug 15, 2014 13:20:50 GMT -5 mnholdem said:

I think Pro Board newbies should be made aware that, although a response should be written outside the quote box, one can also go into the quote to delete everything except the words you want to quote. You do not need to keep the boxed quote in its entirety, as some of them can be quite lengthy.

liane just mentioned that in her post above...

NOTE: I discovered that I need to type just a few letters below the quote box FIRST before editing the quote. Otherwise line space below the quote box disappears and I cannot type in my reply.

I'm not sure that's the case. There's a scroll bar on the right, and if you scroll down, there should always be some space below the quote box to enter your reply. Unless, of course, there's not