fedora-list Digest, Vol 55, Issue 100

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2008-09-13 at 23:54 +0930, Tim wrote:
> Tim:
> >> If it's technical possible for *this* list server to automatically
> >> reject quoted digest replies, I'd like to see it done.
> 
> Patrick O'Callaghan:
> > +1, but it could be tricky to pull off reliably.
> 
> There are news servers which do it fairly well (reject for quoting,
> HTML, and other reasons).  e.g. If a post is substantially more quote
> than new content, then it rejects the post and you get an explanatory
> message.  The original poster than gets a chance to correct the problem
> without bugging anyone else, or embarrassing themselves in public.

Rejecting on a quoted/new threshold would certainly discourage excessive
quoting, but deciding on the magic number would not be easy. As with all
rule-based solutions, there are bound to be exceptions and the only way
to handle them would be with a moderator, which I suspect nobody is
going to want, or with something complicated like Slashdot karma,
probably overkill for a list of this type.

> You could detect by counting the quote prefixes, or looking for a few
> specially inserted bits of text in the digest, that wouldn't be there if
> the replier had snipped the quoted text.

Canaries so to speak. It's a thought.

poc