Post lengths
 

At some point in the past, people complained about the size limit on posts being too limiting. At the time it seemed like allowing a very long post size would be a good idea, and so I bumped the limit up to 20000 characters.

This is a pretty outrageous length for a post. At this point I find long posts to be an tremendous annoyance, which is saying a lot since I thought I was wordy.

It's not that I don't usually agree with them; what's annoying is the poster's inability to respect their audience. Long quoted passages are a waste; huge screeds are impossible to respond to. Most of the time they are not posting in their own words, but engaging in a huge cut-n-paste as if quantity strengthened the debate.

This is not what we should be about, I feel, but I'd like your take on it. I'm proposing we cut the post length down to 4000 characters. Assuming an average line length of 50 characters, that's 80 lines of text.

Opinions?

Do spaces count as characters?

4000 seems a little low. My recent Cult-like Mindset thread was 5338 characters, and it was all my own words. I thought it was pretty good, and people seemed to take to the thread.

I think the longest post I have ever written was this post, and it was 9935 characters. That one was all my own words, too, although admittedly it was very, very long. Nic Name even commented about the length. I guess it would have been better if I could have reduced it by half, but it was such a complicated story that it's a little hard to do that.

That being said, though, I completly agree with everything you said in your post. Some people really should learn to say more in less words. And the thing where people cut and paste pages and pages of documents, with their only original words a terse "<b>READ THIS.</b>" at the top is not only insulting, it's really, really lame.

How about a compromise, like 9000?

I have to admit, though, if a post goes over 7000 characters, I usually don't even read it. Unless over 40% of the post is text quoted from another poster on this board. In that case, I'll be annoyed, but I'll still read it.

I believe you should calculate the length of my valedictorian post and choose a size limit that would kick my ass for writing such a monstrous, overblown, pretentious screed.

Of course, SteveDallas' recent post clocked in at 9620 characters, and it looks to be very well-written. I wouldn't want him to have to cut that down too much, so perhaps somewhere between 9000 and 10000 is the sweet spot.

Whoops, I didn't see you there. Well, there you go. :)

Any size limit can be circumvented by posting several times in a row. Code cannot really fix the issue of excessive quoting; beat 'em down with logic and stuff.

10K seems cool.

Yes.

Yeah but with a limit on post length it's easier to pick up reading when your short on time.

How would you know when you've maxed? Type it all in then it's refused? That would be frustrating to us one/two finger type types.

At the bottom of the text editing box, there's a javascript link "check message length" that will tell you how long your message is and what the max is.

Bruce, have you ever considered teaching yourself to touch type? It's so much more efficient.

Oh sure, I've thought of it. Even put it on the list of things to do some day. But my arthritic old fingers can hardly put in my hearing aid batteries. But then, that might be from the hairy palms.;)

what about a probationary period of 3 months or 100 posts during which the limit is set lower, so that people learn to be concise, and then lifting the limit once the member has stuck around for a while, seen how the culture of the board works, etc.

If someone has been around for 3 years, and one post out of a hundred is really long, I'm more inclined to read it, since it's probably worth the length.

Don't know if the software has that kind of flex to it.

just my $.02

-sm

Ohh, I love that one. That's exactly what's needed for new posters, to slap them in the face if they spam us, because a lot of them just want to flip a large message out at you and run.

If the feature isn't available, perhaps it could be added?

I've never seen in on a web-based forum, but some mailing lists I've been on actually restrict new subscribers from posting for a few days, or require moderator approval for their postings for a few days. Hey that would be fun... a cellar moderation cabal.

Red Flag
 

Given the nature of the Cellar, the moderation of posts in that manner kinda goes against that nature.

Yep I agree with Syc, the cellar is all about freedom of speech. Otherwise someone would have kicked Radar out shortly after he arrived.

instead of moderating new members, just have them verify their membership with a valid NRA or GOP member ID#

Once that's confirmed, let them flame away. :shotgun:

You have to pan a lot of gravel to find the nuggets.
You have to sift a lot of verbage to find the gems.
Restrictions lead to mediocrity.
Just my opinion.

It looks like 10000 characters is the consensus here. From the SteveDallas piece, that's plenty of space for a longer rant.

As for the first post restriction, there's nothing built in to vBulletin for that, but I've gone through the code and it would be easy to add.

Now I just have to decide whether to go off the vBulletin main path. I've always felt the best way to manage things would be to just run with whatever they come up with and stay pretty generic as a forum. The last thing I want to do is to maintain a set of "Cellar patches" that has to be integrated back into the forum software with any upgrade.

A lot of forum owners go nuts and put in the kitchen sink to customize their stuff, but the people are the difference here.