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The problem with quoting a whole message every time is that it may be lengthy and then results in amplification.
1 line gets quoted, the next person replies to the prior and that quotes the whole message included the quoted bit, and so it goes until you have a Christmas Tree of HTML blockquotes.
This is then the worst possible outcome for the very devices you mentioned: mobile phones or tablets. The page becomes a scrollfest, and the blockquotes squash the text into ever diminishing horizontal width... itself causing the page to lengthen even more and amplifying the effect of that scrollfest.
I know that because we tested it. Then we laughed, hard... and agreed not to do that because it was plainly silly. Very funny, but ultimately silly.
The chaining of replies works best, but ideally we'd have finished the implementation more fully... as in, if you clicked "in reply to" we wouldn't jump you away but would have fetched that single comment via AJAX and shown it in context. We didn't finish that unfortunately, but that would resolve the "what was this in reply to" thing.
It doesn't solve fisking though. But then again, those who fisk are indistinguishable from trolls most of the time, so I'm cool with not encouraging that.
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Velocio
@bq
If you could actually just make it quote the whole post by default that would be good. That half-baked implementation has never worked on phones or tablets.