When I created the user summon feature 9 years ago (almost exactly), I removed the ability to "quote" posts. Due to complaints, years later I teased a feature which would allow users to quote entire posts without it counting toward their post words, CP or Viz.

I can finally say that this feature is in the works and should be done within a few months. No I'm kidding, it's finished now

It's very simple to do. All you have to do is place the post ID within the post tag like this:
[post]ID[/post]

When you reply to a post from a thread page, it'll automatically add this filled out along with the summon to that user. There's also a 'Quote' link next to a user's post in the reply window. I also just added the ID number next to the posts on the thread pages (not currently visible to cell phone users due to limited space).

There's a lot of different uses for this that I can think of beyond just quoting someone:
-If you want to re-use the content of one of your other posts without having to paste it all up again
-Creating a "resource" type post that references useful posts related to the post content
-Collaboration posts where users respond and you embed their post into your 1st post so that your 1st post neatly contains all of the desired posts

If you link to a post that is in a private forum, users will only be able to see that content if they have access to that private forum. I should also point out, if it isn't already obvious, that the content of a quoted post updates when the original post gets edited. In other words, the quoted post is always up to date.

Here's an example of this in action (quoting my next post):


Hovering over the quoted posts shows the name of the user who created that post and also a link to the thread which it originated. Clicking that link will take you directly to the original post.

You can make the quoted content appear within your line of text like this and you can even place them within other tags like this:

(in this example, I placed it within a div tag that has a height of 100 px and scrolling overflow)

There's a few issues with it at the moment but nothing serious. I should also point out that it doesn't place any extra strain on the database since I coded it as efficiently as possible. Let me know though if there's any serious issues or exploits caused from it.

Test reply for the purpose of quoting.

Quoting another post (this will then appear as a quote within a quote when seen from my post post):

Staff : Letting you all know so that you can test it out and give me feedback of potential issues.

Edit: My original comment on this feature was irrelevant. I didn't see the part where there's a quote button in the new reply page.

As for the feature itself, it's pretty cool. But with the current amount of traffic, I can't imagine using it much. There isn't enough clutter in recent threads to need to address someone through a quote. I suppose that referencing something from another post is still on the table. Perhaps this could improve conversation.

Would it be possible to quote just part of a user's post? I honestly see more use in that rather than quoting full posts if you need to address something in particular amidst hundreds of words, or if you were able to highlight in any way the exact part of the text you want to quote.

I know the above can be done via copy/pasting, which is how we've been doing it all this time, but just like you say, copying part of another person's post just makes up for higher word count, something which could be bypassed with this feature.

Anyway, I do see potential in this feature. It looks kind of good in the Reply page when no one uses layouts, so we shall see how this works outside of the "standard conditions".

For example:

EDIT: Okay, it looks good at least on my layout. The Preview button was unresponsive for some reason, so I could only test it as a post.

This is actually a pretty great thing to have here. While it might be slow now, this would've done wonders for the AMAs and Debate forum with addressing multiple points in multiple posts. There's so much word count padding being negated here.