excessive quoting

Fuzzy Dunlop · Post by **Fuzzy Dunlop** » Sun Mar 03, 2013 11:03 am

Not the most pressing issue in the world, but since this forum is moderated in such an above-average manner I feel it's not out of the question for this sort of post to be made against the rules or guidelines:

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 795#542795

Posting in this style seems inconsiderate. You're making everyone scroll through three screens of quoted material just to read one new line. It really has a negative impact on thread readability, I find. Quoting three or four previous responses in a post is fine I think, especially when there have been posts by other people in between responses, but there's no reason for posts where 98% of the content is quote trees.

LiamOS · Post by **LiamOS** » Sun Mar 03, 2013 12:51 pm

I'd personally agree that it's really unsightly(and generally poor etiquette) to do something like that.

As far as enforcing this goes, it seems something that'd take a lot of consideration.

Post by **otseng** » Sun Mar 03, 2013 4:46 pm

In this case, the main problem is the uncivil exchange, rather than the post quotes being so extensive.

But, I'd be open to adding some other button in addition to the quote button that would produce a shorter post. Instead of repeating the entire post, it can just be a short text like "Replying to Post 1 by Fuzzy Dunlop".

puddleglum · Post by **puddleglum** » Mon Mar 04, 2013 10:32 am

otseng wrote: But, I'd be open to adding some other button in addition to the quote button that would produce a shorter post. Instead of repeating the entire post, it can just be a short text like "Replying to Post 1 by Fuzzy Dunlop".

I think this is an excellent idea. If we had this button now I could have used for this reply instead of quoting what you said.

Sometimes when I am responding to a specific statement in a post I find that I need to quote that statement to make sure my response in understood but when this happens I delete all of the post except the part I am responding to.

SailingCyclops · Post by **SailingCyclops** » Mon Mar 04, 2013 11:38 am

otseng wrote:But, I'd be open to adding some other button in addition to the quote button that would produce a shorter post.

Or you can limit quoted text blocks to some specific length, like say 10 lines. This would force a replying poster to shorten the quoted text to contain only the material relevant to the reply. It would require some PHP programming, but I don't think it would be too difficult.

SailingCyclops · Post by **SailingCyclops** » Mon Mar 04, 2013 11:43 am

LiamOS wrote:I'd personally agree that it's really unsightly(and generally poor etiquette) to do something like that.

I think it is laziness. It's so simple to hit reply. It takes little effort to edit a quote to be specific to what you are referring to.

Fuzzy Dunlop · Post by **Fuzzy Dunlop** » Mon Mar 04, 2013 4:11 pm

Another particularly painful example for discussion purposes:

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 085#543085

Perhaps make the most egregious violations reportable? Not like a bannable offense or anything. But maybe if you have more than 10 nested quotes you can get a "moderator comment" at least. It's mainly an issue with newcomers to the forum, and you have to figure most of them would clean up their posts after a couple of friendly reminders.

Post by **otseng** » Mon Mar 04, 2013 10:15 pm

[Replying to post 4 by theophilus40]

OK, I added a reply button next to the quote button. Thoughts?

McCulloch · Post by **McCulloch** » Tue Mar 05, 2013 12:08 am

[Replying to post 8 by otseng]

Cool. Works for me.

SailingCyclops · Post by **SailingCyclops** » Tue Mar 05, 2013 12:35 am

[Replying to post 8 by otseng]

This is cool! And the recipient can click on the link and see what is being replied to. Nice work!