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