User blog comment:Toughpigs/Wikia's new Forum demo/@comment-1411998-20120727231204/@comment-781424-20120728180119

@Pecoes: I do understand that having specifically designed options and tools is more convenient than typing things manually. Quotes can be useful when used properly. However, on public sites, communication methods should be designed in a way that makes it hard to post junk, and makes it easy to clean things up. Wikis were initially designed this way. From this point of view, introducing a quote option is self-defeating, since it gives lazy spammers easy tools to insert junk text into conversations, making them harder to read.

Take a look at this example. Check a few pages, many people quote giant posts with pictures only to add a one-line comment to them. This is what happens with quoting. It will happen on Wikia, as well. The only way to prevent this is to use alternate methods such as links, that don't require post-moderation to make discussions readable.

There's another reason why I think quoting is bad. Regardless of how well you quote the other person, it always takes words out of context. When quoting a big post, it's more important to grasp the meaning of the whole thing. Discussions are more productive when posts are understood fully before answering. Quoting cuts select phrases out of the context, and slightly bends the meaning behind them. It can lead to misunderstandings. I strongly believe that replies should never adress parts of posts, and only adress the whole original messages by linking them, so that when a point is made, the person who reads your post will understand your answers in the proper context of the original post you're replying to, not the cuts you selected.

@Mathmagician. And in the presence of links, the collapsibles are completely redundant, and will only increase the amount of code for no good reason.