jt512 wrote:
...There has been a disturbing trend in forum software toward making it harder to include nested quotes or even multiple non-nested quotes in a post. One common software platform allows multiple quoting, by going back through the thread and individually clicking on the posts to be quoted, but (1) the mechanism is cumbersome, and so it is rarely used, and (2) even when it is used, the quoted posts are not nested or necessarily posted in the correct order, which makes it less useful for following the discussion.
On forums with no or limited nested quoting, conversations frequently become derailed by accusations of people not following the train of thought or taking comments out of context. But you can't blame people for losing the train of thought or taking comments out of context, if they have to read through pages of posts in an attempt to figure out what the train of thought or the context actually is.
In reply to:
In fact, I kinda recall something years ago about Sungam trying to see how many nested quotes were required to crash the server. And succeeding.
No, I don't think he was trying to, or did in fact, crash the server. In fact I don't think his prank caused any long-term, or even short-term trouble for the website. Since this website's niche has always been in-depth discussion about climbing, it would be far better to put up with the occasional prankster than to eliminate the very mechanism that allows for in-depth discussion to take place.
That said, there could, perhaps, be a default limit of three or four levels of nesting imposed by the software, with the option of the poster overriding the default if he or she felt more levels of nesting were required for clarity.
