New Restrictions on Post Character Count

In an effort to help keep things running efficiently, we've launched a new character limit for posts that are defined by your member status.

As ATS continues to grow (now in the top 10 highest traffic discussion boards on the Internet), we need to be mindful of ensuring our services run efficiently for current members, future members, and our all-important visitors. Among the items that can impact site performance the most is active threads with very large posts. We're now making sure our individual posts remain under a size that would begin to cause problems.

The new character count maximums are as follows:
4,000 -- Freshman members with less than 100 posts
5,000 -- Junior members with a post count between 100 and 500
6,000 -- Senior members with a post count between 500 and 1,000
7,000 -- Advanced members with a post count over 1,000 (and Moderators)
10,000 -- Conspiracy Masters (regardless of post count) (also Super Moderators)
10,000 -- Administrators

Forum Exceptions:
10,000 -- Debate and Collaborative fiction forums have a 10,000 character limit


Any member with important content that should be retained within in one post but exceeds your character count should contact one of our staff to discuss options for posting the material. We will always make exceptions to many of our regular guidelines for important content on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, if your reply or initial post requires more characters than one post, feel free to split your message into multiple parts.

Thank you.


(updated information)

[edit on 25-4-2006 by SkepticOverlord]

One problem with the modification is that if you hit preview it wipes the text field clear and thus there is nothing to post or make changes to.

Works as normal after posting first (no preview) and the hit the edit button.

[edit on 25-4-2006 by Regenmacher]

Looks like that technique of saving the form will not work anymore then. I suppose 'Ctrl + A' followed by 'Ctrl + C' is still the safest bet to not losing your work.

The preview functionality has been fixed.

I find this funny as all get out. With the addition of this feature I have to ask that the rules on one line posts be adjusted. I'd like to request that a one line post that is pertinent to the subject of the thread be allowed. Several times I have had a one line statement that I have expanded on just to not get hit for a one line post.

As ATS continues to grow (now in the top 10 highest traffic discussion boards on the Internet),

Very interesting. Where'd ya' find the top ten listing? I'm curious.

BTW - I posted and the counter started counting backwards. When I
discovered that I had misspelled something I went back and fixed it
and resumed typing from where I left off, but the counter didn't resume
counting backwards.

This seems to be pretty straight forward and beneficial for the site.

If the member goes over the amount of charachters he is permitted, does the Post Reply just become not functionable?

Congratulations to the team.....

It is a direct reflection of the fantastic efforts put in by the Mods/Admins and the generous contribution by the members. It is the open mindness attitude to aim for a higher plain of understanding, is what keeps this site ticking.

Great Effort guys

Thankyou and great to be a members

Cheers

Knowledge23

Maybe some feature for the future: Will/Could we be able to "buy" more characters at the ATS store? Say I have a post which is over the 5,000 characters I might buy extra characters to be able to post the complete post? Or if you go over the maximum your points get subtracted automatically, i.e. 1 character = 1 point?

Originally posted by Gemwolf
Will/Could we be able to "buy" more characters at the ATS store? Say I have a post which is over the 5,000 characters I might buy extra characters to be able to post the complete post?

See the above announcement post:

Any member with important content that should be retained within in one post but exceeds your character count should contact one of our staff to discuss options for posting the material. We will always make exceptions to many of our regular guidelines for important content on a case-by-case basis.

The issue is not so much the ability to find a way for members to post more than 5,000 characters, but to keep posts under a certain character count for overall efficient operation of the board.

Originally posted by sardion2000
9th? We've dropped a bit. I remember when we were like 3rd or 4th in total traffic.

Actually, new boards were added to the list that have higher traffic than us.

We were hovering between 3 and 5 when there were less than 900 boards in the list, now there are over 1,700.

I think this is a great way to control the size of posts...especially those which are huge 'cut and paste' jobs.

Another fine addition, imho.

If there is a 'new member' poster who would like to 'say more' than 3000 characters can carry, it is an easy enough matter to simply make another post in addition to the first.

3000 characters, based on an average of 6 letters per word (taking into account spaces and punctuation) is 500 words. That's a lot of words and anyone taking part in a writing contest is familiar with that count.

Look at the boards that rank higher than ATS.

None of them fit the same niche as ATS, in otherwords ATS has no equal in conspiracy related forums.

Traffic might increase if you opened up a motorhead section

[edit on 25-4-2006 by Regenmacher]

I, for one, don't like this idea. As fancy as it is, I wonder how much bandwidth and whatnot is saved by the misering of individual characters. For instance, these three lines are some 200 odd characters. Would saving that much off a post truly be beneficial? And wouldn't people simply 'chain-post' to get around this?

DE

Originally posted by DeusEx
Would saving that much off a post truly be beneficial?

Actually, "chain-posting" is much better for the server than one large post.

Here's the issue that maybe didn't get explained enough...

All of ATS is heavily reliant on a large database that is growing even larger at an increasing rate. When a user clicks to view a thread, each post is sequentially pulled from the database, processed for display, then formatted for view. The biggest potential performance bottleneck throughout all our site's codebase is the process of formatting individual posts for display in a thread.

I ran some tests and right between 6,000 and 8,000 characters is where potential problems can crop up. The more "additive" stuff such as BBcode, the more the server needs to do before your post is ready for display. And the more the server needs to do to larger posts, the entire board can slow down if one thread with a big post becomes popular.

For example, the original "Rebel Ridge" posts slowed down the entire board because the initial posts were over 15,000 characters. And not long ago, another thread with several posts over 20,000 characters caused the entire board to crash... making it difficult to discover why it kept crashing!

Normally, on lesser-trafficed boards, this isn't a problem. But some of our popular threads can experience more than 500 simultaneous viewers at any given time. Even modestly popular new threads often see around 60 simultaneous people viewing the thread. That's a lot of database work.

But I'm curious as to why the limitation on newer members? It just seems to me that newer members have a tendancy to post larger amounts of info simply because they are new here. Perhaps then this is an incentive to post more often so you can post longer threads? If that's the case then I think that it's a very good idea, but again, newer members might have more of a testimony to something than those who've been here longer, so they may require more words..that make any sense??

I think it's important to note that no one is being restricted in what they can post, per se. They can post as much as they want but it just might require more than one post to do it. No one is really being limited here