Well, as you can see, it depends which of my replies.

Two answers:

First, note that there are two ways to reply.

One, obviously the one that you are using, is to click on the " " above a message, in which case (unless you edit what is produced*) you are going to generate a message that starts with a quote of the specific message you replied to.

The other is to click on "Post New Reply" at that top of the page, in which case you are adding to the discussion but not necessarily replying to any specific message, so in that case no quoted text is generated automaticaly and your reply starts out blank until you type something.

*In the case where you reply using " ", your reply window will start out with a quote of all the text of the specific message you are replying to. If you want to keep that, just start typing at the end. If you want to get rid of all of that, just use normal editing methods to delete ALL of that before you start typing. If you want to shorten that (as I did in this reply here), be careful, do not delete the portions in square brackets like QUOTE and B and /B and /QUOTE (if you get rid of some but not all of them the message formatting will get messed up), just delete part of the quoted text between the bracketed B and bracketed /B carefully.


[This message has been edited by Stefan Daystrom (edited 10-07-2001).]