Maximum Post Length

[Cliff]

I think that sometimes the length of posts on the board can be too long. Specifically with all of the quoting that can go into it. Two people quoting each other over time can get pretty ridiculous and hard to follow.

Currently the character limit per post is 60,000 which is roughly 10,000 words. I would maybe cut it down to 1,500 words at first and see how that went. I want to encourage people to take more care with exactly what they're quoting rather than the entire post or two. Basically whittle the posts down into more easily digestible chunks. Even if the response was split into a couple of different posts I think it would be easier to take in. Not twitter level, of course.

To give an example here is PHP's "Answering Everyone's Cousins Questions". viewtopic.php?f=1&t=37686#p685074

Whether you agree or not it's got an interesting take and encourages discussion. The original post is roughly 1,500 words. That's more or less in the realm I would want the encourage.

What I want to try to discourage are several other posts that quote the first post in it's entirety or some of the other responses which are in some cases 2,000+ words long. Nobody has done anything "wrong" here. It's not like there are rules against it.

Maybe this is just a problem for me and everyone else thinks it's great. In which case, I'll happily live with it like I have for the last 15 years. It's not that it's terrible. It's just hard to follow at times.

Thoughts?

[akvikingsfan]

I generally agree with what you’re saying. Generally speaking 2,000 words should be more than sufficient - in law school a lot of my papers were limited to 2,500 words. There’s very few situations where I think that many words would be needed on here.

Another option which I think would help with readability would be to limit nested quoting to just one. I’m not sure what the limit currently is, but when we start getting to 2 layers of quotes, that’s when I start to have issues. Just adds a bunch of extra to the post that’s not needed.

Just my personal opinion. Other’s views will vary.

[Dames]

I agree, limiting the quote layers is good. I think it might be already limited to 2 layers though. Maybe I'm mistaken. I generally cut out or break up huge sections of the original post when I post, but it takes some time and effort. When you're in a rush, it's easier to just quote the whole post, but it makes for really tedious reading IMO. You'd be better off just hitting reply without a quote if you're not going to address specific parts of the original post.

Placing a lower cap on the post and leaving it up to the poster to figure it out is probably the best solution.

Let's face it, on some of those long posts, it's hard not to tune out half way through the post anyway. I can get way too wordy sometimes myself. I have so much important #### to talk about guys.