Does quoted text add to message body size?

[mortimer]

When someone quotes a message, you see something like so:

[ QUOTE = name ; number ] stuff [ / QUOTE ]

( I added spaces so that the system would not interpret any of that as actual quoted text. )

If someone quotes 1,000 lines of text just to add their sentence to the thread, does the quoted text take up any space or is it just a pointer to the original text?

If it takes up space, has City-Data ever considered not allowing quotes of more than, say 10 lines by design?

I ask this because I consider quoting someone's text in it's entirety in the next post or close to it to be rude and disrespectful as well as wasteful and annoying. If the original post is small, that's OK, but to have to scroll a page or more off to read the new stuff is just annoying.

I know that City-Data formerly allowed quoting photos and discontinued the practice, because even with a fast connection, too many moro..... er, ... not clued-in people would quote/copy pictures for the n-th time over and over again for nothing.

I've tried asking people not to do this, but have only gotten anger and reprimends as a result. Others have DM'd me to say that they agree with me, but don't want to get mixed up with the arguments.

If City-Data has to expend disk space to unnecessarily quote a jillion extra lines of text, I would think that limiting quote sizes would be a good suggestion.

If the quotes are just a pointer, I would still think it was a good suggestion to improve readability.

[Marka]

No, quoting text doesn't take up any considerable amount of space, though I agree it may be annoying. I don't think there's a way to make it impossible for people unless we ban quoting in total.

[mortimer]

My question was whether the quoted text takes up the same
amount of space as orginal text - that is, one byte per letter.

If there was a pointer, there would just be a few bytes to
reference the original text, but the storage only takes place
at the original location/post.

If the quoted text is only a pointer to the original, then quoting
a jillion lines would not use up any appreciable extra space on
the server.

My suggestion was just to have a default quote length of ten
lines or something like that, so that someone who really wanted
to quote a jillion lines would have to do something special.

Most people just want to make sure that there is no confusion
as to which post they are responding to and aren't addressing
stuff line-by-line.

I was attempting to kill two birds with one stone.

[Administrator]

The amount of space used by quoted messages is not really a big concern. However, quoting many lines of another post is a bad form and makes the post less readable, as you noticed. Having a default quote length would require custom coding by us, since our forum software doesn't have such an option.

[Ninjahedge]

Originally Posted by markablue

No, quoting text doesn't take up any considerable amount of space, though I agree it may be annoying. I don't think there's a way to make it impossible for people unless we ban quoting in total.

They kind of do that on some sites.

www.wirednewyork.com is one of them. They generally discourage people from using a full quote unless they are doing something like breaking it up and replying point-by-point.

They are not MEAN about it, they do try to warn people about doing the full quote thing, and they also only get rid of the quote itself (not the entire post) when people do it.

Just to keep things clear, it might be good to start doing the same, but leave the quote tags in there so people reading it will at least know who the person was replying to. That combined with a reminder might rattle a lot less cages that absolute enforcement....