rainbow8, thanks for investigating these features and sharing your findings and questions. I consider myself pretty computer-resourceful and the way I got that way was by doing exactly what you just did, only a whole lot of it for a long time.

I think Pomegranate's "small reply button" is the little thing marked "Reply" in sunrise's graphic (#14). Pom apparently called it that to distinguish it from the larger "Add Reply" buttons (one each near the top and the bottom of the page).

When I click one of the big "Add Reply" buttons I get a chance to type my own reply from scratch into a blank box; there's no quoted text there from anyone else. I read in "linear" mode (see "Display Modes" in the blue bar) so my reply just gets tacked on after the others as the latest one. I think in "threaded" or "hybrid" mode it would appear as a reply directly to PurpleLady50's original post.

When I click on the "Reply" button for a particular post, I get a reply box with that post already quoted. I can edit the quoted text before posting to take out parts of the quote that I'm not responding to, or even the whole quote. If I choose to keep any of the quote, I can add my own words before the quote and/or after it. Again, in "linear" display mode my reply just gets tacked on as the latest but in one of the other modes it shows up as a reply to the post where I clicked the button.

I don't understand why ECHOES's buttons look so different from mine. I gather that somehow, the forum software knows to send different users different flavors of the same page.

In (partial) reply to PurpleLady50's question: I noticed when I started out here that my privileges were very limited at first but increased as soon as I'd made one, then five, then ten posts. Here's sabby spelling out the process in more detail.

I've tried combing through the FAQ for more information but I keep running into so much other interesting stuff that I never get to half of what I was looking for -- and by the time I'm ready to quit, I no longer remember exactly where I found whatever I found, nor how to get back to it later. I find that for best results, I can only study the FAQ in small doses.