I re-wrote -link-, & tried to post the new version ~last week, but got an error message about a 50k character limit - after spending ~2 hours re-adding some of the lost formatting copy-pasting it (another, major, issue; even with ctrl-shift-v). I face-palm quit ~last week, after pasting the whole re-write in, editing it, as even bold text formatting is lost upon pasting, only to be given an error message after all of that - saying that there can only be 1 emoji in the title… and after that, it wouldn’t even let me post! Surprised that the title actually saved - if I’m not allowed to save it b/c it’s over a character limit, then why did it save the changed title!?. Why didn’t it pop-up a character-limit error message when I was pasting-it into the form, instead of upon clicking the save button ~2 hours later?! Bills in Congress can be >1,000 pages; my proposal is ~250,000 characters, with markdown, and html text formatting tags, added, and over 300k if I re-add the incomplete sections that I nixed before trying to post it last week. The re-write is mostly macro details; if I wrote micro-details, it could probably easily get 10x+ that long; the possibility of user(s) wanting to paste 1,000+ page proposals exists! 50k characters, even discourse’s current 150k?, is clearly not enough for ‘policies for/by people’ that this site is all about - please, remove, &/or raise, the limit.
these links may-be relevant ~ should be able to go up-to 10,485,760, utf-8?, characters, with varchar - also, note (2nd link says so) that varchar has better performance than character (n); if Discourse uses psql & the latter:
Also, please, remove the 1 emoji in the title rule; it’s way-too boomer. Thanks.
Further details: over the last >week, I learned the ‘markup’ & html tags formatting that this site/software uses, to get the text formatting back to close to the same as in a word processor - but, it added like ~7,000 characters!, + another, only ~400 words/2,400 characters, section I wrote yesterday after realizing that I hadn’t written it; another almost 10k characters - 50k total is way too few! The markup+html is completely unnecessary administrative overhead, and the extra symbols ruin line-breaks, unless you can see a side-by-side preview like on the site… Silicon valley/the whole W-NW coast/ is becoming more & more out of touch with the rest of the country & world; their minimalism > ux/usability is getting worse & worse - there’s no-way any non root-memorization non-psycho is going to long-term remember all the text-formatting symbols & tags (especially when Silicon Valley latches onto the next thing they seem to think is an end-all, every few years). Word-processor gui-topbar-ribbon, behind-the-scenes metadata, not actual characters & tags in the text that then have to be \-escaped if you want to use any of them, style is much friendlier - the least this site could do is to accurately convert pasted word-processors’ text into its own mixed-encodings for text formatting - a very quick search of github shows quite a few opensource repositories already available to recognize/convert-between .docx/.odt/.pdf/…!? Just some feedback, in this feedback section.
Aside feedback; here’s the co-founder of discourse telling someone to have their users paste to 3rd party sites when over the characters limit…; 99k char limit
If you, whoever you(s) are, really want to do things like merging proposals; I hope that you’re moving away from discourse’s software. Along with out-of-touch things like the above, discourse’s ethos of no deletion, right to remember > right to be forgotten, is especially incompatible with probably the majority of people outside of the coastal North-West, esp. in the age of nlp-ml>llm (cough, “ai”, cough) bots scraping data w/out permission; and all the posts/flags by users asking to have posts deleted, &/or accounts deleted, must be time wasting for you!?. It’s better to have both; that you should be able to delete any of your posts/topics//content, but any logged-in user who has seen/loaded that content gets to keep seeing it, for days/weeks/maybe month(s), with a notification/style-change/… that after that time, -this- deleted post/topic/account/… will be truly deleted ~ except the viewers’ own reply(s); if they so want to keep them even after they’ve been orphaned from the now no-title, graveyarded, deleted topic or reply, that they replied to. To most sane individuals, the right to be forgotten > right to remember; but, with a right to remember still accounted for; _ temporarily_ giving those who’ve viewed it time to screenshot, data-scrape, etc; if allowed ~ for historical records of public/popular figures (not lowly us’es, hopefully), … i.e. Discourse looks nice, but is Ruby/Ruby on Rails, & other out-of-touch silicon valley, unperformant ~ underneath, just as Java is Academia’s nightmare, out-of-touch, gift to everyone. 