Jacob Haller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

[about a adding threshold to reject posts with excessive quoted text]

>The problem is that persistant overquoters, of which there are many, simply
>discover ways to defeat the limitation.  For instance, I've seen people do
>stuff like the following to artificially increase the proportion of quoted
>text:
>
>I
>n
>s
>e
>r
>t
>i
>n
>g extra lines for quoted text.

I question whether I'd really even warn someone who did that on one of my
lists before giving them the heave-ho; it's just so blatant an effort to
screw up everybody else in a manner that obviously is frowned upon.  Also,
I don't think you can compare (as your example did) what people do in
Usenet groups to what they do on Listserv lists where they know there's an
owner watching (even if from an extreme distance) and where they know they
can get expect some degree of hassle for going around the end of the fence.

>Also they'll manually or otherwise change the quotation character from > to
>| or some such, etc.  Some email programs allow you to choose the quotation
>character which would easily allow people to defeat this feature, and if
>the feature was implemented in LISTSERV I'm sure many mail clients would
>allow quotation-character choosing because people would demand it expressly
>to defeat the feature.

True enough, but in my experience (given what I've seen on lists and in the
personal e-mail I receive every day), the bottom line is that people who
post are just TOO LAZY to trim off previous quoted text, even if it's all
in a giant chunk at the bottom of an e-mail.  That accounts for about 95%
of the excessive quoting problem, I think, and if people want to go to all
the trouble to circumvent the software's attempts to curtail it, then
that's something I'm willing to deal with as another list
ownership/management challenge.

-- John