Can we, should we, limit quoted text in a post?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@carninglipartners

I am active on a non-Discourse forum where many members will respond to a (sometimes long) post by quoting it in its entirety and then adding one line at the bottom. “I agree” and “+1” are typical responses. It’s not pretty, or easy to navigate.

Clearly better member education would help. Also I suspect that the ease of quoting in replies in a Discourse forum would reduce the tendency to over-quote previous posts.

Still, I would be interested in your views on whether Discourse can - or should - restrict the length of a quote, either through an absolute character limit or via the ratio of quoted to “new” text.

Thanks
Dan

Quoted for truth!

But seriously, as you said – a non-Discourse forum – this is usually because that non-Discourse forum makes it too easy to do the “wrong” thing.

It is a good idea to block very long quotes or otherwise suppress them, perhaps even warn the user if they quote a giant post.

I just haven’t seen that much “in the wild” though so I am leery of making changes on the basis of imagined behavior versus actual behavior.