Per Post Character Limits

Hi.

I and other guide writers have reached an issue wherein character limits are, well, limiting what we can add in to our guides and whatnot. Is there a way for the limit to be increased for certain posts, or alternatively, a way to make it so code ("invisible" characters) don't count toward the character cap?

I.e., if I add a URL onto preexisting words leading to a post explaining why Nematona cap is not always superior to Ocelomeh hat in my guide, and only add the url onto those preexisting words, it's not adding any visible characters, just the url code to cause existing letters to turn into a url, however it's still erasing my post and becoming "Too Many Characters" for adding the url. Is there a technical reason for this?

Understandable if this isn't able to be changed, but it would certainly make some of our lives easier if it could be adjusted a smidge!

Just as a curiosity, what is the per post limit currently?

Judging by my Equipment section being within like 1~10 characters of the limit with 1549 characters, I'd say it's around 1550.

I've asked this before (noway), and I believe Scragg told me it's not possible to increase the cap. The best thing that you can do is make your OP link to different sections of your guide, and plan ahead how many posts you'll need to reserve.

Yeah that's what my guide does. Since mine was the second one written on the site I didn't have a lot of estimate off of so I had to guess, unfortunately the space has become cramped as the guide's evolved. It's mostly an issue in the equipment section which I have no way of feasibly moving or splitting onto other posts/sections and a lot needs explaination

Take a picture of a text heavy section and post the picture in it ^^;

:x no

no!!! Dx

Not much text in the section to begin with, besides that it'd look so tacky ):

Create a thread and have it locked. Create a second thread to discuss the first thread, with the first linked in the OP. Ask for it to be unlocked whenever you need to add a post to increase post amount, but until then you can make edits freely.

That's how I'd solve it, if it really is an issue of space. It makes the original info harder to find, but only by a single click. It could always be bookmarked though.

I haven't hit the per-post character limit, oddly enough (one of my THF guide posts apparently has 13500 characters). Why is it not affecting me?

Are you using tables or other BBcode tags?

Tables take up a lot of space.

personally I think stickied locked threads with the information would be the best way to present it, and have the discussion thread separate, but that's me.

/hides

No, the two posts with the most content are practically walls of text. Unless spoiler tag somehow magically avoids the restriction, but that would not explain the first post in the guide.

Proth must have mistyped and left off a zero or something, the instruments/daggers section of my guide has over 7k characters (quite a bit of it formatting).

Would love to see if there's a solution to the problem, even if as Proth noted in OP the only change is that formatting doesn't count towards character count.

I get the "too many characters" message @ 8126 lines or 65,001 characters

This is without formatting, I've hit the cap @30k I believe before.

This is 35,236 characters, and can only fit one of them in each post. This is just pulled from my linkshell color guide.

Ara what did you break :o

This reminded me of:



Thanks for the great guides, by the way. They're a true treat in nearly every way. The only downside I, personally, run into is that as I tend to jump around from job-to-job, I don't really have much in the way of super specialized gear or much of the high-end job-specific stuff listed in each set. It /is/ neat to look at though. I just wish I had gil for, room for, and luck with drops enough that I could have it all. In many times, I have none of those three things. My BLU probably suffers the most because of the job's versatility in so many different situations.

11486* characters apparently. Word led me astray, felt like too little but figured the equipment boxes made up for it. If 36,000 ~ is the upper cap then it must do something strange with counting equipment boxes, wherein each one counts as several hundred (thousand maybe) characters. I literally can not add another 3 characters before the post is erased.

It would make sense, it takes a lot more code to display an item set than just [itemset]12345[/itemset].

I store each post in MySQL (our database) with the datatype TEXT. It has a limit of around 65k bytes which is around 65k characters. It can vary since the character encoding is UTF-8 allowing some characters to take up more than one byte. The byte count of the rendered post is usually greater than or equal to the source of the post. So this is what hits the limit.

Kalilla has a good work around in reserving the next few posts when you are writing guides. When the schema was originally designed, I didn't foresee a need for more than 65k bytes per post. The combination of complex BBCode and posters writing guides has made this limit a hassle.

I do have an option of converting the field to "MEDIUMTEXT" which has a 16 million character limit. I will likely hard code a limit because 16MB for a single post is crazy and I know someone will try to hit it. I will experiment with changing the schema on my local replica. I'm still debating on whether to make the change since 99.99% of posts don't go near the limit.

Another option is to make a way for users to create guides in another section of the site and paste special BBCode into a post.

Example usage:

It would load dynamically when the page loads. It would also feature revision history and you can even add collaborators to your post. It's essentially like a wiki but using the same bbcode parser as the forum. I actually created something like this year(s) ago but never released it nor was it polished. I will look into the state of the code.

Scragg is the coolest dude ever. Seriously.

I know Serj just said this, but Scragg you really are awesome.

Thank you so much!

Both of these ^

Thanks much for the response Scragg, the guide section thing sounds absolutely awesome.