I just typed out a reply to a few posts in the thread about removing statues. It wasn’t a short reply, but by the standards of this message board, it wasn’t an especially long one either.
I went to post, and got the message that my post was too long, and that there is a 3,500-character limit on posts. 3,500 characters is about 700 words, and if you’re including spaces between words in the character count (as this seems to do), then it’s even less than that.
This is, quite frankly, nowhere near enough for a message board like this where we have extended debates using analysis and evidence, and often bringing in outside quotations to make our points.
I hate the infinite scrolling, I’m not a fan of having my browser keyboard shortcuts hijacked, and I don’t like the look of the new board that much, but none of them are a deal-breaker for me.
This would be a deal-breaker for me. As far as I can tell from looking back over some long posts from the SDMB, the limit on our VBulletin site was somewhere closer to 20,000 characters. That’s much more reasonable for a site like this.
Please fix this, because 3,500 just isn’t going to do it.
I just pasted the Nate the Snake story in Word and it said it was 56,451 characters. That is undoubtedly the longest message board post I ever read. Assuming some pre- and post-story commentary, we should go with a limit of 60,000.
Yes, I wholeheartedly agree! I, too, just tried to post a reply in the thread about removing confederate statues and got that 3500 character limit. What are we, Twitter? Come on!
It is not “infinite scrolling” because you eventually get to the end of the thread (after, perhaps, the 9999th reply). It is simply unpaged threads, and if you leave a thread, you usually come back into it where you were and scroll on, without having to look at the top of the page. Actual infinite scrolling is designed to make the site you are on endless – threads themselves are not literally endless.
I actually came to the feedback area to post huzzahs, as I thought everything looked pretty good so far. But this does sound like a problem. I have quite often posted comments much longer than 700 words. I guess we’ll just have to continue in multiple posts as is done in Twitter threads?
The funny thing is, I know for a fact that it was 2500 for me sometime yesterday – definitely not 3500. This sounds to me like the work of the infamous Nannybot based on something in your user status. The admins would not likely have increased it such a modest amount. Hopefully there’s an admin setting for it to either set it to a reasonable level or eliminate the limit entirely.
I knew some genius would drop in with a comment like this. All I can say is that I’ve had plenty of excellent conversations on this board that involve long posts. If you don’t have the attention span for that sort of discussion, you’re welcome to stick to the Thread Games forum.
Jaysus! You can’t make your point in 700 words? If you need more than that, you aren’t discussing; you’re filibustering. When I see a post that long, I skip to the next one. Learn to be pithy already!
