These forums are pretty great and in fact they are my favorite forums so far in terms of layout and functionality. There however is one thing which I think should be changed, and that is how you are blocked from quoting someone for 60 seconds after making a post, let's look at the following scenario.

You're posting in a discussion that is progressing quite fast with a lot of active members participating in it, you decide to chime in with your own opinion after post 9 expecting to make post 10. However once you hit the reply button you notice that your post is in fact post number 12 because two other posters already made their own posts on the topic. You decide that you should edit your post to comment on posts 10 and 11 too so you decide to quickly quote poster 10 to copy paste the quote code to put in your own edited post number 12.

However here you hit a roadblock. Rather than letting you at least enter the post to take the quote for editing your own post you are blocked from the post and you are forced to either wait the 60 seconds or copy and paste the responds and put them into normal quote brackets.

"What's wrong with normal quotes ?"

Well they don't display the name or time of the quote. A normal quote is simply like this...



But a proper quote is like this...



Not a big deal but it's still better than normal quotes and as I see it it's quite hard to try to write up a quote bracket like that from scratch. The quote I made above has this code.

[quote name='Ellert' timestamp='1322159695' post='19446267']

timestamp = 1322159695, and post = 19446267, what is the formula behind these numbers ?

How to fix this ? Well how about allowing posters to press the "Reply" button, but not press the "Add Reply" button until the 60 second time-limit between posts has been reached. That way you get to work with any code within posts in your edits and you still can't abuse and spam on these forums by posting more than once every 60 seconds. Or is there something I'm missing, or perhaps I'm the only one who is so impatient as to feel 60 seconds is too long a wait to even start editing your post.

So what do you guys and gals think ? Do you think this would add to the forums or do you feel it's a trivial matter of little importance that could just as well be skipped ?

The latter, sort of. It's probably though that I've never found myself in your position, but it does seem somewhat trivial in my opinion. Just say "To post above: Whatever" or something, or even copy and paste into your own quote box. Is anyone going to look down on you for not showing the name of the poster directly above you?

I'm all for the forum being improved, and I can understand that some might this annoying, but it seems to be relatively unimportant in comparison to some of the larger flaws this forum has.

I agree, I have come into this multiple times myself. It also happens when you want to quote things from different pages, the multi-quote only seems to work for 1 page. I suppose you could copy paste that though, but still that's more work than should be necessary. Why not have it so you can just quote somehow, but don't actually have to go to the reply screen?

In general I think it's tied into being sent to the actual full editor and not the fast reply. If they got rid of the limit on posting in general (Which I imagine is what would have to be done for what you want to be done the quickest way) and we know how that'd turn out.

(Shudders at the thought of Skyrim forum without the 60 second limit)

I think you should be able to quote and post replies no matter how long it was since your last post, but you can't hit post itself until your 60 seconds are up.

im sure whatever you've got to say isn't so important that it cant wait a couple of minutes

Im with the OP 100%. Id also like picture signatures and the ability to post pictures in thread.

I'm a big user of tabs and often have several threads I want to reply to moderately quickly.

I get the reason behind a 60 second holdback, but perhaps something reduced is a good compromise? 30 seconds perhaps?
I think it's mostly to prevent double-triple posting... I've modded forums where younglings would spam "submit" and fill up pages of the same sentence to up their post count (Which is a form of respect in a lot of forums around the internet).

flood control doesn't stop this. You can easily multi-post by just clicking the "Add reply" button a bunch of times.

I agree with this as well but understood why they did it.

And then once the mods find that, they ban him and delete all those posts which reduce his post count back to start but with a ban on top of it.

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Whoa, pic sigs would take up way too much bandwidth for a fair amount of people, on top of the fact that they are annoying and distracting.

Posting images I have less issue with, but a link to said picture is a better option, since this is a forum and not an imageboard.

I agree with the OP.

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This also irritates me quite a lot, though to be clear, it's not Bethesda's doing but Invision Power Services, who wrote the forum software. It does need to be fixed, though.

Bethesda's responsibility is the excessively long flood control: shortening it to a more reasonable duration such as 15 seconds would be largely as effective and far more convenient for forum members, but it seems no amount of pleading will get them to reduce it.

Pshh, only shuddered? I froze for a few hours at that thought! Also, it can be annoying at times, but I like it. It keeps people's post count to a size I can compete with if they joined in the past two weeks.

I've heard rumors about aa special night every month, where people would post special images... *shudders*

I wouldn't be so sure about that...

Apparently we had this, then as with all good things, some people came along and ruined it with porm & gore spam. Personal I dont see the need for images when links work fine and dandy.

:P Well it shouldn't always be about the number of posts but the size of them. Just made a post on the Skyrim forums which is a good 2000+ words... and is getting buried under a lot of smaller posts!!!

*Wonders if faster small posts is really such a good idea*

Then again I'm not suggesting faster small posts but better tools to lengthen pre-existing posts I guess

A minute is really nothing though.

To you, maybe. To those of us who can't multitask it feels like a long time.

The flood control is there for a reason, and certainly at the moment it is an ideal length. It allows moderators (who are not limited with the time restraint) to deal with problem members who are spamming the forum with unnecessary and unwanted posts. Most members do not see these problems as they are generally sorted and removed quickly. A 15 second post time would be the same as having none, maybe once things settle down it can be reduced to 30 seconds but it will be a while yet.



Quality and thought.