[Harp-L] overly verbose quoting

[owner-harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx]

In a thread like the reading music/theory thread people want to respond to
the other posts and the tendency is to quote the posts and type in the
responses.  Up to a point that will work well.  We always encourage people
to edit their posts keeping the quoted portions as small as necessary
leaving just enough context to allow someone reading the response the
ability to follow the thread.  Anything more than that should be edited
out.

Why we encourage tight editing is #1 for clarity.  It's hard to wade
through all the quoted text to figure out what's going on.  The other
reason is resources.  Larger messages slow our mail server down and fill
our archive up.  We pay for storage and I recently had to purchase
additional storage because the accumulated archive was so large that we
were running out of disk space.


As a subscriber here's a selfish reason you might want to watch the
quotes.  Anything over 15 kb gets automatically held.  We have this rule
mainly to prevent people from accidentally reposting a digest with their
posts but it also stops certain kinds of spam and overly verbose
quotation.  A held post can languish for 24 hrs depending on the timing. 
Sometimes we will bounce back a post that's all quote with little new
content.  So if you want to stay in the mix with a discussion keep your
posts under 15 kb otherwise you might find yourself wondering what
happened to my post?

harp-l-listowner