I’ve been a member of AR for quite some time. The last time I posted the system was very rudimentary, couldn’t delete or edit and it was a mess so I stopped posting.
This new system is loads better, and I appreciate the idea that quoting can be very useful but it can also be overused.
It’s not a debate topic, it’s a polite request, and if you can’t comply then I will not respond.
its all well and good but how do you know that isnt God’s plan?
It seems @Kataclismic is more interested in making demands and bitching about everyone quoting him then talking about a topic he started, making a statement about dark matter, then bitching at the lead admin @David_Killens for bringing his own thoughts on that matter, bitching on how he derailed his own topic, blaming everyone else for it. He’s quite the hypocrite.
I don’t doubt that he’s an atheist. He’s just not very appealing or approachable as he comes off severely sensitive and acts offended over every little thing.
I would however RATHER love to see him TROLL on a Christian forum.
Unfortunately, I can not force anyone to comply with your request. I can also not enforce your desires because quotes do a wonderful job in keeping things from total confusion and chaos.
Quotes are an effective tool in this forum.
God’s plan is to have claims made about him that are easily refuted? Then it’s a pitiful god.
I made a simple request that turned into a rude cascade of nonsense. If you can’t be polite go away.
@Kataclismic That’s nice dear. But you’re not a staff member.
You don’t make demands on here.
@David_Killens and his crew decides when and who goes & stays. Not you. You either refuse or cannot comprehend that this community is not under your control.
As far as being polite goes. You’ve been an asshole since you mouthed off at David. You’re not polite. You’re a hypocrite.
You can’t come here. Be a fucking prick and when you’re called out on it. Feign innocence. Because you’re not. Don’t expect someone NOT to punch you in the face when you purposely shoot them in the foot @Kataclismic . You did mouth off at staff member @David_Killens. Not a good start when that staff member has the respect of the other members. So yeah. It’s your fault. You fucked up.
So then why are you bitching over formatting and quoting instead of content? Is the exact amount of characters quoted more important than the actual information-carrying contents of the reply? I’m beginning to think that is your priority since you don’t seem to answer to any of the actual content in here.
Thank you. I hope the rest of your day is as pleasant as you are.
please use quotes when replying to me.
@Kataclismic I don’t have a problem with you, even the quotes thing. But please understand that for this admin, this forum is the model of cat herding.
An idiom denoting a futile attempt to control or organize a class of entities which are inherently uncontrollable.
We are all different from each other, we all have different priorities and perception of the world.
You’ve posted it in the debate forum? There are other forums on here you can post it in, if your primary interest was not debate.
Well that’s revenge I guess, I just dribbled Shiraz everywhere… 
@David_Killens,
I didn’t make any demands, I made a request. @Get_off_my_lawn copied my entire thread-post in order to reply. That isn’t necessary, it’s a waste of space, but instead of acknowledging it was a waste of space I get targeted for making the request. It doesn’t matter that people are quoting me to intentionally be rude for making the request, that’s totally acceptable. We don’t need to focus on the debate at all.
I don’t feel this is fair. I haven’t been unreasonable to any of you. If you can’t abide by a simple request then that’s fine, you will be ignored. I only demand it if you want a reply from me, but you don’t need a reply from me to be rude, so go for it.
Any chance we could get to the topic of my thread now? At all? Or should I just leave because it’s unreasonable to make a simple request?
Yes, I did quote your entire post. And your complain is that it is a waste of space. several hundred bytes of space. If it had been in the 1980ies or before, I would have agreed. Or even in the 1990ies with limited screen resolutions. OK, let’s say before 2010 to account for low internet speeds. But today? Nah.
In any case, you neglected answering to the actual contents of my reply, instead deciding to have a singular focus on a few extra bytes, and to make textual formatting a priority instead of the actual topic at hand in the thread. Would you also have reacted if I had shortened your quote, adding extra unnecessary and extraneous superfluous verbose verbiage to my reply, such as to add to the length of the reply with added textual characters that did nothing but lengthen the message unecessarily, so that it would appear to carry more actual contents and value and in addition make it appear that I had written a reply that was far more thought out than it really was, and that would could thereby impress the reader with a lot of words that were strictly not necessary (but included anyway, even including comments in parantheses) but whose composition were designed to just distract attention from the fact that I had deleted a few characters in your original posting?
And if you continue to quote me I will stop responding. If you want a reply then abide by my request. Do you see your paradox now? I’m more than happy to reply, if you can stop being rude, but why would I?
So now I want a quote. When did I ‘mouth-off’ at David? 
Do you realize the chaos and mayhem this (and other threads) would end up in if quoting was not allowed? Nobody would no longer understand who was replying to which message. I actually had a long pause from the old forum because of the dysfunctional quoting features. In any debate where the answers are supposed to be a rational discourse based on rational arguments addressing the text in question rather than one-liners in the form of “yes”, “no”, “LOL”, “me too!!11!!1!”, and “fuck off!”, having the ability to actually quote the text one reply to is essential. In the absence of textual quoting, one will need other, roundabout ways to establish the connection to the text being replied to, including paraphrasing the original content. This generates a lot of work, not only for the person replying, but it also requires a lot more work for the reader, since he/she then would have to understand from the context of the reply what is being replied to, and possibly even searching backwards in the thread to find the original text if the replier does not give an adequate summary of the non-quoted text.
There are other advantages to quoting whoever and whatever one replies to, but that is somewhat beside the point here, so I will leave that for later, if that would ever happen to become more relevant.
To your comment that verbalizes the thought that if I continue to quote you, you will stop responding, I have the following to say (see, I have already used more space paraphrasing you than doing the actual quoting): Go ahead. See if that stops me from quoting you again.
Further, you comment that if I want a reply from you I must abide by your request (see, again I use more space paraphrasing than quoting). That is not a request but an order, a command. You order me to stop quoting, and you threaten me with the silent treatment as punishment. Your statement further makes it appear that you seem to believe you have some kind of authority that you can use to scare me into saving a few bytes here and a few bytes there by not including the quoting tags and the actual text you wrote, and that I will be so scared to miss out of your comments that I will abide without hesitating, and come crawling back on my knees to beg for your forgiveness. But guess what, I’m not a five year old that you can scare into obeying by threatening me with the silent treatment.
Next, you ask if I see the paradox now. Then I reply that I don’t see a paradox here, only one whiney side that complains about a few extra bytes being used in quoting, generating orders of magnitude more text than necessary by refusing to accept that quoting is the accepted norm in this forum, and that it makes it much easier to follow the discussion, especially when the replies are more than one-liners.
Lastly, you state in a seemingly jovial tone that you would be more than happy to reply if I can stop being rude, and then you finish the sentence with a clause in the form of a rhetorical question of why you would do that. That last rhetorical question gives away your intention of not replying anyway, thereby revealing that your last sentence is a threat in disguise, wherein you again threaten me with the silent treatment.
In sum, I have seen people work themselves into a frenzy on form vs. content on this and other discussion forums, but none of them have been so enraged by a few extra bytes in a quote. In fact, your whining about a few extra bytes is a throwback to Usenet of the early 1990ies, before the invention of the Word Wide Web, when transmission rates on the Internet was measured in kilobytes per second and the high-speed intranets on university campuses was measured in the lower part of single-digit megabits per second, so saving bytes here and there actually had a potentially real impact when large amounts of data were being transferred. But that was thirty years ago, and both transmission speeds and storage space have increased, while cost per storage space unit have decreased. So that is hardly a valid argument anymore.
By the way, which version do you think would be easier for the general reader to comprehend, this version of paraphrasing your concerns, or an alternative version where I quoted your actual words?
Edit: minor typo/grammar edits, as well as moving one paragraph to a more logical place.
Edit 2: I just couldn’t resist: 
Your huge wad of text still, at no point, justifies copying my entire post for your very first reply. It just doesn’t.
And I’m completely aware that I can’t stop you being a rude prick, that’s all you and I’m sure you’re proud of yourself. I don’t need to reply to a rude prick.
So I’ll stop now. 
LOL.
(blablabla 20 characters…)
