I’ve been trying to post in this thread:
and I keep getting the response:
“The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 2 characters.”
WHA?? It’s signifigantly longer then 2 characters. I tried this in Mozilla Firefox and IE with the same result. Thoughts?
The only time that I have seen this message was when I responded to a post (quoting the relevant passage) and hit preview before adding my stuff. Quotes don’t count, apparently.
Are you here for a second opinion? 
Seriously, I had the exact same experience mentioned above; I had tried to preview a post that had a quote in it – and nothing else. The system is designed to reject any posts that are just quotes and nothing else. . . it might be set so that you have to have more than the quote and “Me too.”
Apparently it’s a ploy of abuse on other boards. Our folks are better behaved . . . or perhaps they just hadn’t thought of trying that here . . . guaranteed to get them a mighty DopeSlap from our staffers if they do try.
your humble TubaDiva
Gar-onteed!
When I was using IE, clicking the preview post button would occassionally insert random characters at the start of my typing. One such character was invisible, and seemed to trigger an “end of post” event. If that spurious character happened to be one of the first 3, or was it 8 back then?, the board rejected it with an error message.
Weird though- I had a post typed in, not just the original quote. Maybe I formatted it funny…lemmie double check.
I are stoopid. I had the whole thing in quotes, including my reply. How I didn’t realize that (I’ve only been posting to boards for 7 or so years, give me a break!) is beyond me.
TubaDiva,
Wasn’t there one post, quite some time ago, that consisted entirely of quotes & hyperlinks within those quotes, and was quite funny?
Or perhaps I’m misremembering.
Sounds vaguely familiar . . . lost in the mists of time. Did it make Threadspotting? Check the archive pages.
your humble TubaDiva
(Note to self and/or others, if you get there first.)
Yeah, I know, there’s always someone in the class that says, “WHAT archive pages?”
The Straight Dope Archive Page (old stuff)
and
The Straight Dope Threadspotting Archives (really old stuff, kind of like Monty)
your humble TubaDiva
Hey, I’m not really old! I’m incredibly old. There is a difference!
…
Soooo… How old are you Montie?
I’ll be 65 in Dec. Fess up!
Whippersnapper
I can’t believe that.
Hey, whaddaya know, he’s right!