Post Field doesn’t have a limit?

[promise444c5]

I was trying to update my thread recently and I eventually ended up losing a wall of texts from my previous post because everything looks normal after pasting but the half of the post was gone after hitting the post bottom ..

But you can just copy it back by viewing previous pages right? What about the BBcode formatting? It’s all gone and that’s not even a thing for mobile users.

I’m not sure if the post field [textarea] have a max-length, I inspected though and I couldn’t find any “maxlength” attribute but I’m sure the backend or the db stores a max amount of characters for a single post .

Is there a reason why maxlength wasn’t included?

[LoyceV]

The limit per post is about 64 kB, although I've hit lower limits when entering lots of BBCode (I think it was a table).

[promise444c5]

The limit per post is about 64 kB, although I've hit lower limits when entering lots of BBCode (I think it was a table).

MySql row size limit? I understand it now.. i was confusing it with what i was reading here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.7/en/column-count-limit.html before.

Another question, what do you mean by the lower limit? like less than 64bytesKB ?.... if yes then can we say it's the BBCode or Only admin have an answer to that ?

Sorry for the questions. I just get a little inquisitive sometimes.

[Zoomic]

The limit per post is about 64 kB, although I've hit lower limits when entering lots of BBCode (I think it was a table).

Someone made a post and hit the limit, so they were forced to make many reserves to continue the post.

I'll do a lil search for it.

[Mia Chloe]

~snip

I knew the forum posting has a max limit however getting to know it's size related actually got me thinking, initially I was basically fixated on the forum having strictly a character count limit. But if it's size related how then does the forum handle images? I know they are not directly uploaded though does it mean we'll have it being counted as just characters?

I was thinking also about the forum having something like a character tracker like a ratio of total characters to the max you could plug in but it doesn't seem very necessary if it's size based.

[promise444c5]

~snip

I know they are not directly uploaded though does it mean we'll have it being counted as just characters?

Yes but extra bytes with the ‘url’ opening and closing tags..i guess that’s what LoyceV meant by table, meaning it has more BBCode tags increasing the space it occupies . You literally have table tag and extra continuous table data tags within throughout a table.. not excluding extra stylings you add on each table data so basically the space get used up faster but you won’t notice unless you submit   , I didn’t try preview so I can’t really tell if that also ignores it..

It won’t be easy to track though because of some non ASCII characters like emoji [ => not this but this => “🥲” ] and other non ASCII chars

[SeriouslyGiveaway]

I was trying to update my thread recently and I eventually ended up losing a wall of texts from my previous post because everything looks normal after pasting but the half of the post was gone after hitting the post bottom ..

You don't lose your post content, that is only not displayed well.
You can click on your post, edit and see the full post content.

If you are still worrying about content loss, you can use a sort of document composing or note tools to compose your post, save the content there before copying it to your forum post.

AFAIK it's 64,000 characters. I tested it recently and it hasn't changed.

Posts over 65535 bytes get cut off at 65535 bytes. If that makes the BBcode invalid in certain ways, then you get the INVALID BBCODE error.

Also, note that a byte is different from a character. Because SMF stores "special" characters in a particularly space-inefficient way, each Russian character uses about 6 bytes, and each line break also uses 6 bytes.

[promise444c5]

I was trying to update my thread recently and I eventually ended up losing a wall of texts from my previous post because everything looks normal after pasting but the half of the post was gone after hitting the post bottom ..

You don't lose your post content, that is only not displayed well.
You can click on your post, edit and see the full post content.

There’s no extra allocation, I think it’s the way the backend handles the storage in DB .. not sure but it probably using TEXT because it’s the one that stores upto 64KiB, unless there’s just another way they implemented that 65535 bytes.

Once you post the post get cutoff.. it can be your existing post content depending on how you edit. E.g if you paste new content at the top or mid and you hit the limit, the existing contents at the bottom will be cutoff with its calculation. Clicking on edit won’t bring back anything unless you already preview it before posting, you can copy the entire BBCODE content from your drafts..
Edit: I’m not sure the draft won’t cut it off as well

If you are still worrying about content loss, you can use a sort of document composing or note tools to compose  post, save the content there before copying it to your forum post.

What made me lost mine was because I copied and pasted new content in the code block which was mid so I lost part of the code block and entirely the last part of my content and of course, I didn’t preview it…

AFAIK it's 64,000 characters. I tested it recently and it hasn't changed.

Posts over 65535 bytes get cut off at 65535 bytes. If that makes the BBcode invalid in certain ways, then you get the INVALID BBCODE error.

Also, note that a byte is different from a character. Because SMF stores "special" characters in a particularly space-inefficient way, each Russian character uses about 6 bytes, and each line break also uses 6 bytes.

Thanks for this.. from what I learnt yesterday, ASCII char is usually 1byte so 64000 chars is probably around that region..not sure where the remaining space goes though, probably reserved or something.. But you will fill the space up faster with this : “ Also, note that a byte is different from a character. Because SMF stores "special" characters in a particularly space-inefficient way, each Russian character uses about 6 bytes, and each line break also uses 6 bytes.”

[Mia Chloe]

~snip

So basically what you are saying is if I make a compound enough table that with the closing and opening tags exceed 64kb I would not be able to post it at all? Or will the system just chip off what's left after the first texts the render and sum up to 64kb? If it chips off some part then it's gonna give a broken output actually.

Plus from what you are saying then tables and normal texts without any tags will be handled differently in terms of size and if this is true signatures should occupy even more.

[promise444c5]

~snip

So basically what you are saying is if I make a compound enough table that with the closing and opening tags exceed 64kb I would not be able to post it at all?
~snip

No..from what I understand, there’s  no restriction when writing, the cutoff only happens at the server side after  posting it .. here’s another example:
If you want something like this:

Mia Chloe

you will input :

Code:

 [quote] [b]Mia Chloe [/b] [/quote]

You will have to  used up more space in bytes because of the “quote”, “code” , “bold” tag and the spaces “ ” added lol .. than you would by just typing “Mia Chloe”.

Or will the system just chip off what's left after the first texts the render and sum up to 64kb? If it chips off some part then it's gonna give a broken output actually.

Once you post it, only the text that can fit in will be accommodated, the rest will be cutoff..

Posts over 65535 bytes get cut off at 65535 bytes. If that makes the BBcode invalid in certain ways, then you get the INVALID BBCODE error.

Plus from what you are saying then tables and normal texts without any tags will be handled differently in terms of size and if this is true signatures should occupy even more.

You can’t create a table without BBC tags or special characters.. size will still be a thing for signature as well either uploading for others to use or when trying to be wear it yourself . Checked profile and the max-character is being tracked, not sure if it’s same TEXT being used .. Probably someone can enlighten us on that.. but I will try inspecting aswell.

[SeriouslyGiveaway]

You can’t create a table without BBC tags or special characters.. size will still be a thing for signature as well either uploading for others to use or when trying to be wear it yourself . Checked profile and the max-character is being tracked, not sure if it’s same TEXT being used .. Probably someone can enlighten us on that.. but I will try inspecting aswell.

Character limits in signature spaces are different than in posts and different by forum ranks while with posts, character limits are same for all forum users and ranks don't matter.

Perhaps the allowed signature styling should change with activity score / membergroup. Like:
- Newbie: No styling (including links) allowed. Max 40 characters.
- Jr. Member: Links allowed. Max 100 characters.
- Member: Unlimited length.
- Full: Color allowed.
- Sr. Member: Size allowed
- Hero: Background color allowed