There are those on here with an attention span that last for longer than soundbites and bumper sticker slogans.
That there are also those with short attention spans should not prevent those who wish to cover a topic in more detail from doing so.
Sometimes things are complex and nuanced, and making it simple and short also means making it wrong.
Yeah, I mean, sure, Cecil could deal with a 700-wd column but this is not a 1970s tabloid. And especially there’s the matter with quotes counting towards the limit. In some of our debates this will be extremely constraining.
OTOH, sure, it controls Walls-of-Text but those are not as huge a problem.
Gotta say, the application seems a bit too directed towards “fast-moving conversation” and this crowd likes to get down in the weeds at times.
This is especially infuriating for me. IMO interfaces should have some sort of uniformity in function – Ctrl-F for almost anything else is the way for the user to go directly to a specified text string in the open window, not to open a function in the “site application”.
Id like your post if I could and offer my full support. The SDMB is not Twitter.
You said in another thread that the character limit for a post is 30,000, but that’s not correct. I just tried to post a long post as a test, and was told by the board software that the limit is 3,500 characters.
The number of replies seems to be causing that. If there’s only a dozen or so, Ctrl-F works the same as everywhere else.
I guess using the reply function could be helpful: one could post a lengthy, multi-post rant and insure that it could be read in a relatively continuous stream by expanding the replies box.
Except you can also only have 3 replies in a thread until someone else posts.
Well, fuck, Discourse is all about limiting every fucking thing. Prty sn t wl b cnstrng r bnng th s f vwls.
Are you sure you want to post this? It contains many vowels and is similar to other posts that also contain vowels.
Personally I like that it encourages people to be succinct. If you really need to post a wall of tldr you can always split it up.
Perhaps she meant to say that posts are limited to 30,000 pixels? 
Oh goddesses. If you think I’m too long, don’t freaking read my posts. Put me on Ignore for all I care. The entire Internet is not your personal playground. If all you can handle are tiny little snippets, go to one of the many, many places that cater to microscopic attention spans.
I have paid full price for this website from day one. No one is forcing me to do crap. The day I surrender my will to the dictates of freaking Twitter users is the day I decide obnoxious loud vehicles everywhere really isn’t much of a problem.
Please fix this.
Okay, you know what, since I want to be productive, here’s an idea. Do what YouTube does. If the post goes over a certain length, make only the first part of it immediately visible and put a “Read More” at the bottom, which the user can click on to see the rest of the post. (Maybe also include an option in profiles to make posts of all lengths immediately visible. Whatever, not that big a deal.)
I generally make substantial posts. And generally get positive feedback from readers. Yes, I’m a little too wordy for my own good, but that’s a 10% overage, not a 200% overage.
So far every one of my substantive posts has had to be split into 2 or 3 sub-posts. The only ones that survive as single posts are the quickie dialog-ish ones such as this one.
Even bumping the limit to 10K characters ~= 3x the current limit would be a major improvement.
Either that or we’re going to see the discussions here degrade into conversations which will eventually degrade into tit-for-tat drivel.
If that is something that the board software would support, I’d be very amenable to that.
The main complaint of TL;DR’s is that their scroll finger gets tired getting through posts that are too long for them to read. If a post is never more 8 lines or so without being expanded, then that may appease those with less desire for in depth conversations.
If that was implemented, I would also like to be able to turn it on and off in preferences. I would generally rather see the whole post than have to click to read more.
I don’t like that at all. I have seen it used elsewhere, and I find it annoying.
There’s no way to see at a glance whether there’s three more words coming or three hundred; and no way to see at a glance whether the post got long because it’s replying to multiple posters within the same reply box, or whether it’s all responding to the same thing.
I vote for just expanding the word limit to at least 10,000; or else ditching it altogether. If a long post exceeds my interest, I’ll just move on – same as if I find a short post, or an entire thread, uninteresting.
ETA: If it’s just a user option that I don’t have to use, I’ve got no problem with it.
I just put together a nice big response to the Coronavirus Updates thread, and got dinged because it was over 3500 characters. However, it has lots of links and a quote, and I think that the link destination text counted towards the limit.
If the Powers that Be are trying to limit visible Walls o’ Text, shouldn’t lonlt text elements that are visible count towards the limit? Link destinations and other code elements that aren’t directly visible should be exempt.
It’s been almost a week since I started this thread, and the post limit in still 3,500 characters, despite your claim in a different thread that its 30,000.
This is getting incredibly annoying, especially since the limit includes both quotes and links. Could you please fix this? Surely all it takes is making a simple adjustment in the board administrative controls.
Oh, fine – be that way. 
Just wondering if this has been addressed or modified in any way?