Winship <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >That leaves begging for compliance and it does not work. >One of my co-owners has seen so much of the excess quoting that she >accepts it as normal and does it herself. Optional filtering by LISTSERV would certainly help. For example, the presence of the list footer in an incoming message is a good indication that that poster did no trimming at all, and could be used as a flag to bounce the message and send a canned explanation. Once people were forced to trim the footer some of them would go on to learn how to selectively quote. A quote/message ratio filter would also be useful. Yes, quoting styles vary greatly, but a simple ratio of the lines that start with ">" to other lines would catch the large majority of excess quotes. The trigger ratio should be settable by the list-owner and messages that exceed the critical ratio could either be bounced or trigger an automated warning about excessive quoting. Implementation of these two simple filters would catch the great majority of posts with excessive quoting on my list, at least. I use Topics and it's very difficult to get compliance. For some time I used full moderation and cleaned up every post by inserting a topic if none were present, or changing it if the discussion had drifted into another area. While I was at it, I trimmed obviously irrelevant quotes and footer lines. I also bounced or forwarded messages that were clearly best sent as private email. The list looked great. All the chat went into the CHAT: topic and subscribers who did not want to get certain topics could opt out of them while still getting the messages that pertained to topics that they were interested in. However, the moderation was too labor intensive and I gave it up after a few months. As a poor substitute for a human in the loop I wrote an autonag program that sent a reminder message to anyone who originated a thread without a topic from the list of Topics (which appear in the footer of each message). Replies to such messages do not trigger the reminder. The autonag program helped considerably. IMO, including this feature in LISTSERV would be useful, though the first two filters proposed above would have much wider application. -rex