[MV] Message length...

[Eric Prentice]

Actually, I'm trying to follow the posts for a little while now.

I can certainly appreciate the request to allow posts over 5k, it is  
really easy for a quick reply to pass that limit. Especially with HTML  
as you mention, 5k gets really small.

Bottom line is that the 5k limit keeps all kinds of crud off the  
lists. It is best to send the messages as plain text, in that case,  
"five thousand characters" (Read like Dr. Evil saying "One Million  
Dollars") should be plenty to say almost anything you would want to  
say. It is also enough to cover short HTML messages which are fine too.

The limit really has nothing to do with disk space, or server  
performance, it is all about doing everything technically possible to  
keep the lists sane with as little human intervention as possible.

Some of the things that the 5K limit helps with are:
SPAM prevention- since SPAM is regularly over 5K
Careless Quoting- we'd much prefer you only include the part of the  
message that you are replying to that is relevant to your response
Lots of fancy HTML- we like your words to speak for themselves, no  
need to make them big, bold or flash to get your point across
Avoiding Attachments- the list isn't a place to share files, 5k makes  
it hard to get any through

So all that to say, I certainly appreciate the desire to have the  
limit lifted, but I do honestly believe that the lists are much better  
for it and if what you had to say was important enough to send in the  
first place, hopefully it is important enough to reformat and send  
again.

Cool?

Eric Prentice
Listmom

BTW, I wonder how many emails like this Twitter gets a day? ;-)



On Sep 19, 2009, at 1:48 PM, cactustweeter wrote:

> All right forum moderator.  This forum got a new server.  Can we  
> bump up the posting size?  I think it's set way too low.  Probably  
> originally set for plain text messages.  When one sends an HTML  
> email, which most people do these days, it seems to incorrectly  
> determine the size of the post, probably because it's counting on  
> the HTML behind the scenes, as text.  It would be nice not to have  
> to split reasonably sized responses between 2 posts.
>
> Thanks...