The discussion explores whether Discourse should limit quoted text in posts to improve readability and reduce clutter. carninglipartners notes that in other forums, users often quote entire posts with minimal responses like “I agree” or “+1,” which is messy and hard to navigate. They suggest better member education and that Discourse’s easy quoting feature might reduce over-quoting. rinking proposes that admins can edit out excessive quotes, prompting users to reconsider their responses. pfaffman shares a use case where students reply to assignments in linked topics, but worries that default quoting could lead to long, unhelpful replies. codinghorror echoes concerns about over-quoting, calling it a “non-Discourse” practice, and suggests that Discourse should consider restricting or discouraging excessive quoting to maintain clarity.
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.
I think that the best action in these situations is to, as an admin, edit the quote out of their post. It’ll give them an edit notification and they get to think about what they did. Other people can also click the edit pencil and see that you edited out the big quote, and they’ll probably catch on.
I am using Discourse as a Learning Management System. I put an assignment in a post and have students answer/respond to it by reply-as-linked-topic and put their answer in a new category. A (related?) problem that I have is that by default the whole message in the response. When I ask them not to, what often happens is that the link to the original message is lost, so it’s not always obvious which message they are responding to. A per-category limit to quote length might help me.
