Longer Maximum Post Length

[tsukikoushi]

Title
Longer Maximum Post Length

Short, concise description of the idea
The maximum post length, while generally more than long enough for a normal journal entry, is too short for the presentation of fiction, essays, articles, and other long-form writing.

Full description of the idea
Having a maximum length on entries does prevent abuse, flooding, and unnecessary strain on the LJ servers, it's true. However, an LJ entry that is twice the maximum length would probably still be smaller, byte-wise, than one or two normal gallery pictures or a single phone post, and would allow LJ to be used more freely by those of us who tend to write novellas when we meant to write stories.

I believe that the maximum post length should be doubled, possibly for everyone, or only for paid and permanent users if that would cut down on abuse.
An ordered list of benefits

• It would allow for the presentation of longer works in the LJ format.
• It would be a great boon to fiction/essay/article communities, allowing more in-depth analysis and longer works to be posted without having to resort to multiple entries or an off-site link.
• It would be another benefit to entice people to buy accounts, if implemented only for paid users.
• It would not be much more server-intensive than the gallery or phonepost subsections.
• It would be of immediate benefit to everyone who uses LJ (or, alternately, everyone who pays for an LJ account), despite their physical location or native language.
• It would be a small sop to those writers currently alienated from SixApart by the WfI fiasco.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• It could be abused by users who maliciously attempt to flood LJ with as much data as possible.
• It could create more long and useless troll-posts in communities.
• It would cause some havoc on friends lists when lj-cuts are not used appropriately.
• It would certainly require more storage space on LJ's servers.

An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing suggestions for implementation

• While I am not intimately familiar with LJ's code, I do not believe that implementing this feature would require a lot of work. The maximum post length appears to be hard-coded; I realize that it's completely understating the problem to say 'just go in there, find the appropriate number, and double it', but at the same time I doubt it would be an effort requiring the use of several coders round the clock for a month.