Reply button

Perhaps Mr G you may like to consider a change to the reply, quote, add reply and fast reply buttons.

I think this causes a lot of confusion in "new to the forum users", ( and even others) Lots of space is used up by unneccesary re-quotes of posts.

That's the way IPB is.

Click on the Quotes for as many posts as you want, then click Add Reply to answer all of them.

Fast Reply immediately opens a box where you can quickly type up a reply and then post it.

Reply just takes that immediate quote.

Fast Reply ftw.

Yeah it was confusing to me for a good long while on Hydrogenaudio until I just flat out asked how to use it and quickly got a reply. It wouldn't hurt to have a site-related pinned/closed topic just on the subject of using the buttons properly because they're damned confusing at first compared to other forum software.

Am image that clearly shows a quotation mark and the word reply is hard to understand? The images are so clear and straightforward. Just look at them. It's so simple. Even hovering them tells you what they do.

Yes it can be difficult to understand, and doesn't need to be debated! It isn't a debate of "why is it hard to understand."

When IPB updated the forum software some time ago from simple Quote abilities by only clicking the Quote button, and changed it to having to click Quote+Reply it caught a few people out by surprise including myself which I'm not ashamed to admit.

If you look at how some people quote other posts simply using quotation marks it's pretty clear to me that they haven't figured out the knack of using Quote+Reply. And since most people aren't going to have the patience or time to figure it out on their first few posts they most likely aren't going to play around with something that isn't straight forward.