How do I cite a comment from a forum post?

Annie_of_the_Stars

I want to cite a comment from a forum post.

For example, if someone commented on this forum post, I'd like to cite that comment.

I suppose I must use the "Forum Post" item type, but how?

Thanks for your feedback in advance.

bwiernik

Enter the author of the post as the author. If you just have a screen name, enter that in the Last Name field. Enter the posting date in the Date field. If the comment is fairly short, you can enter the text in the title field, otherwise describe the content in the title field and put the full text as the abstract. Put the URL in the URL field.

You can automate much of that by copying the link to the post (eg, right click on the time stamp for any post on this forum and copy the link), then entering it at Zotero.org/save

Annie_of_the_Stars

This is exactly the answer I was looking for. I even made an item for your comment to test both the manual and semi-automatic approaches. Thank you very much!

Lennart.Steinke

Sorry for the necromancy.
In APA7, the bibliography is supposed to be
Lastname, Initial [Alias]. (Date). Title. URL.
There's no Alias field. If I enter the Alias as part of the first name, it gets truncated due to length.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

adamsmith

If I enter the Alias as part of the first name, it gets truncated due to length.

What do you mean by that? Truncation is likely just an effect of preview. Entering social media authors as
Lastname, Firstname [Alias]
or
CorporateName, [Alias]

should work nicely for APA

Lennart.Steinke

Yeah, that what I hoped, but it doesn't work.

If I export the bibliography I get:
XXX, L. [IU Internation. H. (2022, Juli 7). Individuelles Studium „Design your degree“. Fernstudium-Infos.de. https://www.fernstudium-infos.de/topic/19100-individuelles-studium-design-your-degree/?do=findComment&comment=184951

It's entered as
First: Louisa [IU Internation. Hochschule]
Last: XXX

Actual name retracted.

It might work for aliases consisting just of a single word, but it doesn't work if the alias contains whitespace.

I tried using non-breaking spaces instead of spaces, but that didn't seem to work either.

adamsmith

Yeah, spaces won't work, indeed. In this particular case, though, I think citing this as "IU Internation. Hochschule" makes more sense anyway -- it's Louisa writing in the name of the IU -- that's not actually Louisa's username.

The APA convention is intended for true aliases where the realname of the same author is known (e.g. if you were to cite my posts on these forums)

Lennart.Steinke

Guess I'll manually edit the bibliography. I was considering changing the style to read the alias from another field, but that seems overkill for a single reference.