Fixed Suggestion: no ziggurats, please!

I can control the number of nested quotes, think it's currently set at 5. A reduction in that would help free up vertical spaces in instances like this, but then people lose context as the discussion continues and more replies are made.

Alternatively I can give each blockquote its own maximum height, and then have overflow scroll, but that is a pretty crude solution and again means that context is lost where users do not decide to scroll through the entire text.

It's a balancing act between readability and preserving the actual content of the messages. On a site like this where I cannot predict the length or type of content people are quoting there isn't a lot I can really do besides the above two options, which both have their issues.

Back in the day people would courteously <snip> longer quotes to prevent this, but again, I can't really control their behaviour. We've learned that adding warnings everywhere has little to no effect on lazy users, no matter how prominent. Then there is the technical challenge of your proposal, how does the browser detect when the 'full' length of the post has been quoted? Does it count the number of characters and set an arbitrary limit? Does it try to regex match the quoted text until it gets a full match of the text? How does BBcode formatting affect this and how does it treat line breaks? If its simply adding the conditional to the 'quote' button regardless of the length of the post - do people really want to be seeing an extra dialog or warning every time they use it? How would I clone this behaviour to the various ways in which quoting is executed (highlight quote from viewtopic UI, full text quote from viewtopic UI, highlight quote from topic review/editor UI) and get consistent results?

As you can see it's not as easy as it sounds. I have reduced nested quotes to a maximum of 3 for now, just to make a bit of a difference without reinventing the wheel. It won't affect existing ziggurats but will for future posts starting from now. It's your forum guys, if you want to discourage people from quoting the entire Rosetta Stone then just send them a polite PM reminding them of this basic etiquette.