As one of the very few improvements to the message boards on the move from the old h2 howerd system to the newer dna (h2g2) system, there used to be a quote button for referencing previous posts. That was invaluable in the absence of any visible threading. Far too many people were rubbish at using it or even deliberately abused it though. So it was taken away across the MBs (after a link back to the previous post was grudgingly added beneath each post).

However, the underlying quote functionality still exists and can be used to good effect. Unfortunately, people still mess up if they are not careful to use the quote tags absolutely correctly and don't use the Preview button to check their post. You need an opening tag and a closing tag placed around the text you want to quote. You must use HTML angle brackets rather than Bulletin Board square brackets. You must use lower case for the tags. You must include the / character to make a closing tag.

NB Rather than quote entire posts, try to quote only the relevant portion - enough to identify the post and the particular point you are addressing. Don't misquote people - either by adjusting the text (use copy and paste to avoid inadvertent errors) or by selecting parts which will misrepresent the whole. That's not polite.

Simple Version

Advanced Version

This version is useful for quoting multiple people from multiple posts because it identifies the person being quoted (although all the links still go back to the post whose reply button is used).

Conversation threads
: T4754746

External

To include a link to an external website in your post, you need to start with the http part of it (not just the www onwards), because that's the bit by which the BBC's software recognises it as a link. Then the text will automatically be turned into a clickable link, complete with the re-direction code for tracking its use. Note that that http part is hidden in posts on the Message Board threads and long links are truncated in appearance by having their middles removed (and replaced with dots). So you can't just copy someone else's link from inside a post and assume it will work in yours.

Check, using the preview feature, how your link will look and work. Some characters are not allowed in links and will cause the BBC software to truncate the link, showing the end of it as plain text. This will break the link. Also, if you don't leave a space at the end of a link, other characters may get added on to it and again cause the link to be a broken one. Preview is your friend.

If you have some characters which are breaking the link, you should be able to replace them with special codes. Eg the @ character becomes %40 and the bracket characters ( and ) become %28 and %29 respectively. Any computer-literate people will note that those are the hexadecimal versions of the ASCII codes for the characters and will be able to work out the rest for themselves.

NB be sure that it's a website which will be acceptable (eg not somewhere with limited access, not somewhere being linked purely for commercial or self-advertising purposes, not somewhere X-rated etc). If the BBC moderators remove your link they will also utterly destroy the rest of any formatting in your post in the process - very heavy-handed.

Internal

If you want to include a link to some other part of the BBC dna sub-system (eg h2g2 or any of the Message Boards) you can usually get away with using just the latter part of the link. With an article page, this means the A-number. For a forum, it's the F-number. For a thread, it's the F-number and the thread number specifier together. For a specific post, it's all of that plus some page information (skip and show parameters) and/or specific post number. Eg:

On h2g2 you can also use U-numbers to identify and link to users, but these are deliberately broken on the MBs. They do still turn into links automatically, but those links then take you to a page telling you that you aren't allowed that feature! The MBs do allow MP lists of people's previous thread-postings (as hidden behind the user name at the top of each post) but those aren't automatically recognised by the link-generating software. So you have to use the full http address for them (as with an external link, even including other areas of the BBC's own site).

There isn't any on the new MBs. Proper HTML formatting was added into the dna system for one of the previous sub-sites but was never really available on the rest - which thus still remain in plain text form.

In contrast, the old h2 howerd system used to have a relatively intuitive system of surrounding words with specific characters to indicate text formatting: forward-slash "/" for italic, asterisk "*" for bold and underscore "_" for underlined. The posted message would then show up with the appropriate effects in place. You could combine any 2 or all 3 of these - though a bug in the software meant you had to use a specific order in some cases. It also had problems with various characters breaking the recognition of the word as a word, eg the apostrophe.

However, one of the long-standing users of the boards created a custom piece of javascript to simulate the old-style formatting behaviour on the new-style boards (plus adding the in-reply-to information which had also been missing from the new MBs at the time). It will work with Opera or Firefox browsers but not Internet Explorer. See the following threads for it: T1652666 or T1690617