• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Character count

maquiscat

Maquis Admiral
DP Veteran
Joined
Feb 9, 2011
Messages
20,945
Reaction score
7,755
Gender
Male
Political Leaning
Libertarian
At the risk of reopening a closed thread, so to speak, I think there is a need for something to help us all out. I'm not disputing he 5000 character limit. Although I would like to know what is being counted towards that limit. Are the characters in the tags counted, for example. Are spaces? Something that could let us know when we are near out limit or something. An active counter would be great. But if nothing else, something that when you go to post says, along the lines of, "Your post cannot be more than 5000 characters. You used 5103 characters." That would at least help us to know how better to edit or cut our posts. This specific aspect was not addressed in the last post on the issue. It closed the issue with the character count was good, and never touched the other concern/suggestion
 
Agreed about the feedback on how many characters you are over, that would be a great feature.

Further agreed that any characters which are for markup, i.e. formatting, should not be counted against the character count limit.
But Knowing a bit about the programming behind all that, it may not be technically reasonable or possible to be that accurate and discerning on the message character count.

In essence the process which counts the characters would have to be able to parse the message text, including recursion (markup which is surrounded by other markup), not counting the characters which go to markup.
 
Ok I have confirmed that what is in the quotes counts towards the character limit. Not sure about code yet.
 
Every piece of bbcode counts towards the total. Color, links, quotes, etc. We tried a counter in the past but it caused more issues than it solved iirc. What I would do if I think I'm close, is switch to the code view with the [ ] button (drop down menu next to undo) and copy all the text including the bbcode, and paste it into a dedicated character counter.

Character Counter - Character Calculator

Free online character counter tool that calculates and counts the number of characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs in your text.
charactercalculator.com

You would be looking at the characters without spaces total because I don't think spaces do count towards the 5000 total.
 
That would be assuming that the character counter you linked to is the same character counter (as in code) here in the forums.
I have no way to determine if this is the case, but you might? I dunno.
 
eohrnberger said:
That would be assuming that the character counter you linked to is the same character counter (as in code) here in the forums.
I have no way to determine if this is the case, but you might? I dunno.
Click to expand...
A character is a character. It's a pretty universal standard what an ASCII character is, about the only debate is whether spaces count or not. That is easily determined.
 
#1 I'd like to see a plug-in that would display characters count when writing/editing a post. Something like "2572/5000".

#2 It's not that big a deal though as when I have a long post I just cut a block of text to Notepad, post the post. Then copy/paste the black in to the next post. Annoying, but doable.

WW
 
WorldWatcher said:
#1 I'd like to see a plug-in that would display characters count when writing/editing a post. Something like "2572/5000".
Click to expand...
Agreed. It would help editing overly large posts to fit into the character limit.

WorldWatcher said:
#2 It's not that big a deal though as when I have a long post I just cut a block of text to Notepad, post the post. Then copy/paste the black in to the next post. Annoying, but doable.

WW
Click to expand...
 
We had it, but it messed stuff up and it had to be turned off for everyone and was only on by request, and I don't know if that's still an option any more either.
 
ASHES said:
We had it, but it messed stuff up and it had to be turned off for everyone and was only on by request, and I don't know if that's still an option any more either.
Click to expand...

Fair enough. Not to interfere basis is of course part of the decision.

WW
 
ASHES said:
We had it, but it messed stuff up and it had to be turned off for everyone and was only on by request, and I don't know if that's still an option any more either.
Click to expand...
Quite honestly this was more information that was presented in the other thread and helps us to understand things better.
 
It does seem like a character is a character, regardless if it's a space or code.

I don't see the point of the character limit, personally. People who write too much just end up splitting it into 2-3 back to back posts. The net effect is the same.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more…