Hi everyone,

Your friendly Chief Engineer here! I’m going to put aside my character for a moment and put on my mentoring hat for our new cadets.

Have some of you been confused when typing out a reply to an earlier post? Or wonder why your reply post didn’t turn out the way you thought it should? Or that there’s so much text in the post, someone is going to have to break the scroll wheel of their mouse to get to your reply?

Well, I have answers to those questions!

The “>” arrows are added automatically - you don’t need to do anything with them

When you reply to a post, you’ll see that the system automatically adds a > symbol before line of the older posts. If an older post already that symbol before it, the system adds another one.

Why?

When the system then reads the note to display it, it counts the number of those > symbols and changes the colour of the text. The darker the colour, the older the quoted post is. The newest text - that is, what you just wrote - will come out as plain white.

You don’t need to play with those symbols at all. They are generated by the system, and the system will add them automatically. Also, don’t remove them either :)

Keep a clean line break for new text

Okay, you are probably asking. But why sometimes does my new text come out in a darker colour instead of white? It looks like it’s part of the same post I just replied to, and it’s hard to catch it.

That’s because of a little quirk in our system. It only realizes the new text is, in fact, new text, if there is a clean line break separating your text from the old text. It has to be a clean empty line with no symbols.

This trick can actually be used if you want to insert new text between two paragraphs of older text. (Why would you ever want to? If you haven’t tried that yet, let your mentor know and they will find a thread for you to experiment with why… :) ). Just make sure there is a clean line break separating your new text from the older text below and above.

Trimming posts

Great, but now my post is huge. There are tons of older posts in there…

And that brings us to the all important skill of “trimming your posts”. Remember, it’s easy for us to pull up an older post in a thread. So in a thread involving two people, you probably don’t need to keep anything beyond thee older notes being quoted at the top. As long as you can tell the context of the new reply, everything else can go. (For larger group threads, you may want to keep more. There’s no set rule - it’s just a matter of what makes sense and ensuring you don’t lose who is participating in that thread.)

It’s really easy to do. Just delete the really, really old stuff, and replace it with the text (in white): <snip>. That way, we know you removed something. (If you are really advanced and what to show off to the CO that you are ready to graduate, you can try multiple snips in a single post - but maybe double check with your mentor first.

As always, if you have any question, ask your mentors. That’s the whole reason we’re here on the Challenger - to show you what do by example, give you feedback, and answer your questions.

Thanks,
Daniel Lerner