This will certainly have some impact on the debate forum. The final right now has rdube in it who I believe does not have posts to grant him the right to the charachters he may need to make his posts. Vagabond himself is well known for some lengthy posts.

Is the staff aware to make exceptions here?

[edit on 25-4-2006 by chissler]

Alright! More rules! Yeah! Why in the world would we want to limit post lengths? Cut and paste is already not allowed. I think this is a really bad idea, as it will serve ultimately to limit not just post length, but post quality. Hell man, what if I have alot to say about something? So a conspiracy 'master' can ramble on and a new member can't? That sounds like some back of the bus malarkey to me. I can understand the new rules about hot linking to photos and external tags to outsourced material, but this one is crap. Oh jeez I hope i haven't exceeded my word count here to tell you that.
If you can't handle the traffic, why blame it on the members?

Originally posted by chissler
This will certainly have some impact on the debate forum.

The debate forum has an exception, all posts are limited to 6,500 characters regardless of member standing.

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.

You can exceed the limit, you just now require approval.

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.

Take the moment read through the explanations on the first page of this thread. I was alittle skeptical at first but SO has explained exactly why this is going to improve the site and I see no reason to disagree with this. No member is bigger than the site, so if the individual member has to make a sacrifice to improve ATS than so be it. Its not our place to argue it, this is a free service.

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
You seem to be looking too hard for reasons to complain about something.

And you seem to be overly defensive anytime someone has a complaint or an issue to the point of belligerance.

Maybe people will exceed their quota regardless, and end the first post they make with, 'continued below' etc etc. The limits would not apply in this case.
Then again, maybe i could wrong here

I just counted my posts. Then I clicked on the Members button, after I remembered it, and checked my total. I found out that I can't count. I was off by two.
I am not a programmer or very technical minded, but is it possible to put the total posts somewhere near the points under your avatar? I'm asking because I have no idea what it would involve, and it seems a lot more convenient.
By the way, for anybody new enough not to already know, click on the Members button. Go to the bottom of the page and put your user name in the search box. You will be shown just how many posts you have.

If you put the cursor over your status bar which is in the bottem of your member area, you will see how many posts you have.

Also when your typing a reply you will see a box in the bottem with how many charachters you have typed so far. The maximum will be set according to how many posts you have.

rawiea,

Hold your mouse over the "post" bar, directly below your points section. It will show the number of posts you have made.

Hope this helps!

[edit: to add] I now see chissler has beat me to the punch, per se.



[edit on 4/25/2006 by 12m8keall2c]

Originally posted by masqua

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.

Does the character limit count quoted text as well?
As in the above quote by masqua.

A small fwiw; a trade sized novel (6" x 9") set in 11 point type and carrying an average 4 characters per word has about 440 words per page.

The same text out of the same book set in 12 point type and written to WordPerfect's word processing program equals about 595 words per page.

So the WordPerfect document will have a five page limit when up against the 3000 character limit.

That seems reasonable enough.


One thing I would like to see is have posters use a blank line to indicate a paragraph break.
As most of us have found, paragraph indents from word processing programs such as Word or WordPerfect don't work when transferred to an Internet bulletin board such as ATS.

I note as well that WordPerfect shows 1060 characters as compared to 2664 characters left to use in the ATS counter.

It appears to count backwards indicating characters remaining to be used.

As well as a blank line and blank space counts for one character.

To add a bit to my above post, I write tech articles for a couple of websites.

One is fifteen pages long in WordPerfect - which equals about 595 four (average) letter words as noted above.

Many websites - as do the two I deal with - have limitations.
I'ts easy to create three temporary WordPerfect files about five pages long each and post one after the other in rapid fashion.
Most times this stops a responder from slipping in a post between your split up post.

Other than getting used to a new posting habit, I don't see a problem.



(Edited to avoid notice by the Math Police....)

[edit on 25-4-2006 by Desert Dawg]

I don't understand how this is an issue for certain members, the staff has simply implied that you can just break up your post into different posts. Rather than one large post, create 2 shorter ones. How is this such a big deal? How is this restricting the users of ATS?

Originally posted by chissler
If you put the cursor over your status bar which is in the bottem of your member area, you will see how many posts you have.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that only works if you are still using Internet Explorer.

Originally posted by curme

Originally posted by chissler
If you put the cursor over your status bar which is in the bottem of your member area, you will see how many posts you have.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that only works if you are still using Internet Explorer.

I run Mozilla and I had noticed that fuction will not work with it. So yes for myself I can only notice that while running IE. Unable to speak on behalf of any other browsers.

In Firefox, right click on the post bar and select properties. The post count is displayed as a number next to "Alternate Text" in the dialog box that pops up.

[edit on 2006-4-25 by wecomeinpeace]

Originally posted by curme

We beat Stormfront! Yay!

Why in the in holy heck stormfront that popular?

because hate is one of the lowest common denominators of humanity...
hence, they have the lowest common denominator board.
so pretty much any mostly white person who wants to cater to his lowest function, can do so...
sad... really...
appreciate our differences, and acknowledge our similarities...

regarding this development...
thanks admin
makes perfect sense. And now Regenmachers posts will be much easier to digest at one sitting
He does superb posts, I just wish i had a computerized innerpage bookmark.

Twitchy, I found your assertion that ATS has a "back of the bus mentality" towards new members to be quite offensive.

There is absolutely NO issue here, no matter how you look at it. All members of all statuses, whether they registered today or whether they own the site are still fully allowed and encouraged to speak their minds to the most full extent they want to. The only difference is the request to break up the longer posts into two or three shorter ones.

So what is your complaint exactly? That new members are asked to go to the back of the bus by taking 15 seconds of their time to divide a post into 2 when it's incredibly long?

No one anywhere said "shut up" or "stop being so wordy", they said "if you're going to be wordy, split it up please".

SO is not defensive or belligerent. YOU do not read things fully before complaining about them. I don't think it's too much to ask that you completely read the new policy before going off on it.

Much ado about nothing?

I still don't like it. Myself and Masqua recently concluded a lengthy challenge post, in which our posts very regularly exceeded six thousand characters. To break the flow of the story like that would have been irritating, at best. What about posts of eight thousand characters? Will we have to learn to stop every now and again so we don't have ugly 'trailers'? Also, apparently, backspacing counts as using a character now. This post is roughly 490 characters as of the end of this sentence.

Also, to be posted, in larger threads where debate of the matter rages, what happens then? I remember threads where bones of contention have gone back and forth for several pages, with perhaps five posts a page due to lenghty commentary, shall we break those up as well? That's a simple way to threads to unravel and lose coherency.

This post, off the cuff, was about a thousand characters. Three times this is the maximum for new members? Perhaps we could boost the numbers slightly, so at least they aren't as hamstrung in open ended debates. And what of the writing forum?

DE