Too often users Quote rather than Reply.

See New to Hottop roasting, advice needed [no offence, Wendell, but the tipping point was reached.]
It's a HUGE waste of contributors time to read / scroll through quotes of our more loquacious contributors for a 1 line comment or question.

And the following:
There is no need to Quote when the reply is above. [Jim, you should know better]

I agree, quoting a full page of text to add a one sentence reply is silly.

My assumption is that some don't know there is a reply button, or they're familiar with usenet where full quotes are the norm. There are others, probably from the legal field, that have the habit of quoting in full. I find it helpful if someone quotes specific passages if that's all to which they want to refer. But in general, I find quoting en masse pointless.

FYI, the Last post does not have "quote" option was my attempt to encourage more frequent use of reply. It has met with mixed success.

The very last post shows reply instead of quote to subtlety discourage quoting en masse. The quote button for posts are available in the topic review section below the main edit pane if you want to excerpt portions of any post in the thread, including the last one.

Perhaps users don't know that to Quote a smidgen, do the following.
Click Reply. Select the bit you need. Click Quote.

An Uber Slick feature we could use :
Select smidgen on 'reader' page, Click Quote / Reply and post page has the selected bit entered in the edit box.

I think a small quote can be helpful, but to quote the entire post is silly. However, it is certainly easy to just not read it.

I usually don't see much point in quoting an entire post - and usually am annoyed by having to scroll and the general waste of bandwith.

However, I often/usually - do a small quote on even the last post - to avoid confusion when someone else makes a post while I am composing my post - without a small quote it may not be clear which post or what I am responding to, so I believe that Jim was procedurally correct with a short quote ahead of his reply.

I've just come by from cutting out AM's lazy irrelevant quote. This is the second edit for a single thread, something of a record.

On quoting the immediately prior post: if the post is long, and the reply just to a small part, definitely quote the small part. If the reply is to a short post in it's entirety, a quote is unnecessary (as was JimG's). However, I don't think unnecessary quotes are very annoying, as long as they are kept short and relevant.

SwingT wrote:However, I often/usually - do a small quote on even the last post - to avoid confusion when someone else makes a post while I am composing my post - without a small quote it may not be clear which post or what I am responding to, so I believe that Jim was procedurally correct with a short quote ahead of his reply.

If someone makes an intervening post, the user is notified on Submit from the Post screen. It's easy to Select and Quote to insert the relevant segment. In the infrequent times an intervening post squeaks in, Edit, Select, Quote & Submit.

SwingT wrote:However, I often/usually - do a small quote on even the last post - to avoid confusion when someone else makes a post while I am composing my post...

Ironically this is exactly what happened while I was writing this post.

For those who haven't seen it, the software checks if someone posts while you're composing your reply. If so, it shows the new post(s) and displays the warning message "POST REVIEW: At least one new post has been made to this topic. You may wish to review your post in light of this."

Hey, between fielding calls from employees, family members, grandkids crawling over me, and various other distractions - I do pretty good to actually get a post made. Often, I'm just glad to eventually get a post finished and hit submit - I have never noticed the "review".

On another forum that I frequent you get thrown to a specific page if you press the quote button for the last post. There's also a 4 row warning above the reply box about this as well.

What I on the other hand find a bit annoying is that you can't use another quote within a quote. Sometimes when you reply to something in the middle of the thread that's a response to something somebody has written at the top of the thread, it's gets a bit confusing when the first quote doesn't show in the second quote, so anybody that tries to follow that specific train of though has to either be familiar with the whole thread, or have to go back and look for the first quote. If you then cascade this a bit further, you get a really complicated situation. Still, this is only a problem in threads where multiple different discussions are happening at the same time, which is kinda looked down upon, so maybe people should stick to the topic instead.