add quotes back and improve replies (very thorough)

the reply function is terrible and dysfunctional for a plethora of reasons, and it does absolutely nothing to "replace" quotes like what was apparently intended. replies are a barebones function and a very bad stand-in for the functionality of quotes.

for one, quoting a message directly adds all of the message text to your message. with this, you also have the option of deleting parts of the message that are unrelated to what you're saying. it makes it much easier for other people to know precisely what you're responding to. this also has the added benefit of not making people scroll up in a conversation to see what you're responding to.
i know replies have an auto-link to the message at hand, but that's still annoying if you're replying to something from hours ago! you still have to scroll back down to read the "reply" that someone was making!

for two, replies are difficult to read due to their text difference (made smaller, and the message trails off.) it's also annoying functionally to have to click to disable or enable pinging someone - with quotes, you could use it completely from your keyboard to just backspace if you didn't want to ping the person you were quoting. it's also pretty useless to show the icon of who someone is replying to and, as i said before, trailing off what their message actually is.

there was no need to get rid of the whole quote option to forcibly replace it with these "replies" that so many people dislike. bring back the quote feature, even if it's used in tandem with replies. there are many suggestions to add back quotes and improve replies:

1. make reply-pings remember your last option, if not making a setting for whether your replies automatically ping someone or not.
2. make the reply text bigger, and arguably, flat-out remove the icon of the person that's being replied to. it's useless information.
3. add back the quote option to the right-click menu. it's been made deliberately more annoying to use quotes now, because people are being forced to accept the reply replacement. if you want to quote, now, you have to copy someone's entire message, paste it onto a > marked line to get the blockquote, and then have to shift-enter and press backspace to exit the blockquote to type their own response.
4. slightly modify the quote function. the only thing i didn't like about quotes, and continue to loathe about replies, is the lack of signifying WHEN a user sent a message. example for my suggestion directly below:

> USER said at TIME:
> user message
> (OPTIONAL: message link)
@USERPING response

this is massively more useful than replies for various reasons.

first of all, as stated before, you are showing the whole message that you're responding to, and you can remove chunks of the message that aren't related to what you're saying. some people only respond to specific parts of a message, and with replies, if you want to make it clear you're responding to a specific part of a message you have to manually spell it out yourself!

again, as stated before, you can simply backspace to remove a ping that you don't want to send. it's annoying to have to click on a button to disable a ping every time you want to reply to someone without pinging them, especially if they're already present in the conversation.

it also shows you the precise time that someone sent a message to show exactly how long it's been since they sent it and the user replied to it. this is helpful because some people quote messages and respond hours late (for example, if they're asleep or at work.)

i've seen plenty of people talk about how much they genuinely don't like the replies, and how much they want the quote functionality back. you can say "oh well the quotes are still there! you just have to use >!" but that doesn't change the fact that it's directly been made more difficult to use them because you have to do it manually. before quotes were replaced, all of the work was done for you: you clicked "quote," the message was quoted in full in a blockquote, and a new line was started outside of the quote for you.