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Character limit is terrible for actually discussing

Elphrihaim·11/3/2014, 8:55:56 PM·17 votes·2,086 views

See Cassiopeia thread: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/zuL472BJ-cassiopeia-plans

Many, many, many times, somebody posts something... only to ram into the character limit.

|: 4096 characters =/= enough characters to actually discuss something.

So can you please increase it?

edit: And if the character limit for replies is increased, can it be made much larger (if you want to maintain a 2^N, why not do 2^15 at minimum [this is 32768])? It's... really hard to work with. I like that it's 2^12, sure, as somebody that worked with computers and just enjoys binary, but it's very disappointingly small.

Personally, I'd say increasing the character limit to literally infinite is fine... But I understand that that is not a good idea.

And of course, increasing the character limit for replies should be packaged with an increased length for opening posts-- and herein I have to say that even the old forum's 50,000 characters was slightly restrictive, maybe we could get 2^20 (1,048,576)-- since we can no longer do multiple posts that maintain the illusion of 'this part of the post but hit the limit', it's a lot harder (imo) to justify a small character limit-- even though nobody will really hit that limit, that sounds like good design to me. When the limit is so small that it is easy to hit, I feel that that is a problem.

Here's an analogy with something we can all relate to:

#Food.

My father taught me that 'putting food on the table' really should be done by putting so much food on the table that after everybody eats their fill, there is still some left. That is what I want the character limit to be like-- so large that it's practically impossible to hit.

The current character limits, though not like Twitter's basically-starving in this analogy (140 for the record), make for a rather scarce feeding time.

22 Comments

basketofseals11/4/2014, 12:50:06 AM6 votes

Is there anything we gained from these new forums?

Padagi11/3/2014, 10:29:18 PM3 votes

Going to be honest here: character limit is too high. Please don't write novels. Write succinctly and to the point.

Nobody wants to read 4k+ characters of why you think the stacking passive on Cass is "unfun".

TeemoHunter133711/4/2014, 2:01:06 AM2 votes

i wish theyd lower the character limit.

i hate the wall of texts i see sometimes

Caustic Crusader11/4/2014, 8:48:17 PM2 votes

I have to say, I love it when I try to keep a person's quote in my response to their post, and have to say maybe two sentences because the character limit won't let me respond in a way that makes sense while still letting others understand the context!

Khaky11/4/2014, 8:17:19 PM1 votes

Discussion =/= rant, try using point form. More often than not a wall of text means useless information thats a waste of time to read and have no value to a healthy discussion.

Daen11/5/2014, 12:22:21 AM1 votes

To be honest, there is some merit to the argument that a post limit can be too long. Do you recall the YouTube changes a while back where people were posting transcripts of entire 400 page novels into single comments? It made the comments section basically impossible to read since you had to scroll past the dumb things to see anything that wasn't spam. I understand this platform has moderators, but there is an upper limit to how long posts should be able to be.

Regardless, I agree. Four thousand characters is a little over 3 pages of double-spaced writing; this is fine for the vast majority of applications, but there are definitely times where I run into that limit just having a conversation. I would say that anything over a hundred typed pages in a single comment is unnecessary for all practical application, regardless of whether it's an OP or a reply. I would say that anything over ten typed pages is unnecessary for all practical application in a reply, except for specific subforums like Lore.

Thus, here are my proposed changes:

  • Character limit for OP raised to 123,500 from ~24,000
  • Character limit for replies raised to 12,350 from ~4,000
  • Character limit can be increased on a board-by-board basis (cough cough Lore)
  • Quoted material is calculated separately from non-quoted material (12.35k quoted, 12.35k original)

In my opinion, there is no reason someone should need the equivalent of ten pages in Word to get their point across. If someone is that long-winded, maybe they should look into truncating their post or putting their ideas into a new thread. Again, this doesn't apply for specific boards that involve huge walls of text (Lore), assuming we can have this calculated on a per-board basis.

Elphrihaim11/4/2014, 9:28:44 AM1 votes

Going to be honest here: character limit is too high. Please don't write novels. Write succinctly and to the point.

Even when being brief it's easy to hit it. I've done it plenty of times-- you just need a long enough subject (e.g. somebody else's post) to be replying to.

And if you say that 'the reply shouldn't be long', I absolutely MUST include the thing I'm quoting:

Discussion view is terrible for my eyes, it pains them, it ruins my train of thought. I have to have things in Chronological view, or else I cannot actually think.

Nobody wants to read 4k+ characters of why you think the stacking passive on Cass is "unfun".

That thread was an example

I could give others, but it was the one that I had on-hand at the moment that I was making this post.

I'll agree that Champion Concepts and perhaps Lore might require longer characters for the initial posting, but for feedback and follow up posts? They really need to be 4k+ characters?

Well, yes, they do. Because the Cassiopeia thread is full of people that actually gave legitimate feedback that still had to divide their post. I chose it for a reason.

i wish theyd lower the character limit.

i hate the wall of texts i see sometimes

I wish they'd enforce a minimum character limit and mastery of the english language-- I hate these short snippets sometimes.

Do you see the stupid oozing out of that statement yet?

Is there anything we gained from these new forums?

Besides notifications, not really.

Eye strain?

Oh, yeah, the colors...

Would his argument have any merit if the character limit were different in different places? Or, OPs vs comments, and things like that?

No. Because both places are far, far too short, no matter what you want to say-- IF it is an ACTUAL DISCUSSION.

Whether people erect mass walls of text is truly up to the posters, and how they choose to organize things. Even if the character limitation was increased, there would still be walls of text.

The current too-small character limit really makes people that CARE hurt. The people that don't care won't care either way-- they can just scroll past what they don't care enough about. If they want a 'tl;dr' it is their own fault-- it shouldn't be on the poster to make themselves brief when they want to explain and discuss things.

If you really are looking for just tl;dr's and don't really actually care about the writer's way of expressing concerns and their content, then you should put a bit more effort into it. Anyway, someone else's indifference in a specific topic shouldn't inhibit anyone who's really passionate about something.

This. The people hurt by an increased character limit are the people that would skip past the post anyway and will get upset that it's multiple posts.

Wegu11/4/2014, 1:16:25 PM1 votes

its not that easy

TeemoHunter133711/4/2014, 3:29:15 PM1 votes

wow. so everyone that disagrees with OP gets negative votes