David, you probably explained it more articulately than I can, but in case others might find the quoting function useful, I'll give it a shot here. If yours is better you can post yours and I'll delete mine.
To start a post quoting another post, click on the blue "Quote" button in the upper right corner of their post. That will open a new post window, automatically quoting their post. You can delete the parts you don't want to quote, then write your own stuff below it.
If you want to quote someone AFTER you've already started writing your post, put your cursor where you want it to go in your post, then scroll down the page, find their post, and click on "Insert Quote" in the upper right corner. The quote will appear in your text box where you left the cursor.
Or you can cut and paste a passage, then highlight it and click the button above the text window that looks like a cartoon speech balloon, and it will automatically be in quote format.
When you're done, you'll have something that looks like this (asterisk added so it won't actually do it).
[qu*te] Blah blah blah ... [/qu*te]
(As at imdb, the coding format is usually [something] beginning, [/something] at the end, but sometimes the "somethings" are different here.)
Beware, as Malina discovered, if you have a stray [/qu*te] lying around or accidentally delete one, it's easy to have the whole message end up in the yellow square with the teeny tiny printing. So when quoting, it's best to preview it before posting (though I myself have forgotten to do this waaaayyy too many times).
Does that make sense?
CrowJumpin was a chance to play with an ascii art program I was trying out and to do something more interesting than just post "bump".
Bruce, so there's a program that automatically does those? And here I pictured CrowJumpin meticulously typing and spacing characters one by one to create those elaborate pictures!
