Is this just your personal opinion or considered mandatory here? In that case, I'd prefer not to quote at all because a) for me newsnet-like quotes are easier to read, b) they are easier and faster to write, c) they are, by a factor 10, easier to use on my local PC after copying, pasting, and saving. For locally saved copies on similar forums, I have also experimented with regular expressions to get rid of or convert quotes but it does not really save any time. Since I save 1000s such forum messages locally, it is essential for me to save time.
Sigh.
I asked you to use the built in quote system because you used your own version which doesn't work and makes your text hard to read. Your quotes are not newsnet (I presume you mean usenet) like - usenet uses ">" before each line of quoted text.
Just do what you're asked without arguing eh?
We're talking about the difference between
message <<
and
They're both about the same effort to type.
They're both trivial to parse via regular expressions.
The second one is much easier for everyone else to read.
The second one is used by almost every web forum on the Internet and so, if you are going to have software which parses/searches forum posts, it seems worth making that software support it.
I resist the temptation to discuss the meta-discussion any further. Just one note: It should have become clear that not every user of a forum considers the default editing tools the best (quite like not every user of a file manager considers the default appearance the best).
Edit the text in whatever you want before you post it, just please do quotes the way all phpbb forums and everyone on them does them, else it's a pain for everyone else to read. After all, the reason for posting a message to a forum is so that others can read it.