You can learn how to do cool things by clicking on the #UBB Code is On link to the left of the page when you are creating a message.
You can also learn what a person did in a message by clicking edit for that message. You can't, of course, edit it but you can see what they wrote.
meanwhile to make a quote
[ qs ] text to put in box [ /qs ]
but leave the spaces out next to the brackets. That will produce:
text to put in box