Or at least spoilering them by default. There are a number of times on here when long discussions end up having massive quote pyramids; a recent example is here, where the same long posts were quoted again and again. This takes a lot of time to scroll past and means there can be a good deal more "noise" than "signal" in a thread, since it's repetetive and all. When someone quotes someone else, they're usually just replying to the one person, which sometimes needs the previous reply for context. The start of the discussion may be a different aspect of the topic entirely and doesn't need to be quoted anyway. Therefore, I'd suggest limiting quote pyramids to two layers (that number is open to criticism, of course), and if someone includes the BBCode for a third layer it's simply not displayed. This was done on NationStates, and hasn't caused any problems for the long debates and roleplays that go on there. It would solve/reduce the problem of incredibly long pages with little new content. Another idea would be to allow quote pyramids of any height, but spoiler them automatically. This would have a similar effect but still provide the entire prior discussion. However, since the Code: [SPOILER][/SPOILER] tags are so rarely used here, that could lead to confusion, and quotes beyond the second layer aren't needed anyway. Simply encouraging the use of spoiler tags might help, but problems can arise when something like this is used accidentally: Code: [SPOILER][QUOTE][/SPOILER][/QUOTE] (For those who don't know what I'm rambling about, here's a (spoilered) quote pyramid. The lines of text are much shorter here than in most real discussions, such as the one linked above, and I haven't spaced it as much as normal.) Spoiler
I'd be happy with this. Sometimes the quote pyramids get so large that I'll go to open a thread and my computer will start to freeze up.
YES!!!! I find it irritating to have to scroll through a HUGE page of quote pyramids to get to the new posts at the bottom...and then having to decipher who each response is really to, and how each response is adding to the conversation. It can get really confusing, especially when there are multiple quote pyramids in a response, to figure out where the conversation is headed...which causes me to tend to steer clear of that thread altogether.
Yeah, something like a spoiler tag for quote stacks would be great!! -np --quote ---quote ----quote -----quote ------quote -------quote gets really old really fast ---------- Post added 16th Dec 2012 at 04:38 PM ---------- something like this would work great that way we can still get to the quotes if we want to HTML: .alt2, .alt2Active { background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #E1E4F2; color: #000000; Display: none; } .alt2:hover, .alt2Active:hover { background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #E1E4F2; color: #000000; Display: table-cell; }
It turns out that the 'quotes pyramid' is a hack that the site has had for ages called Nested Quotes. Unfortunately I couldn't find any hack options that allow quotes to be spoilered after a certain number, but I have been able to adjust the number of quotes that appear in a post. The nested quotes feature has been set up so that it does not quote any more than 5 posts, but I have now lowered it to 2, which means any posts will now contain the quote that the post is replying to, and the quote that that post originally replied to, which should help peeps understand the context of the discussion without creating massive quote pyramids. If the new setting proves to be difficult for peeps to follow discussions then the settings can be tweaked. Martin.
