character counter in web interface

[iolarah]

Title
character counter in web interface

Short, concise description of the idea
Create a character counter embedded in the update-journal page, so that one could see how many characters remain available as one types an entry.

Full description of the ideaI recently discovered the hard way that posts have a size limit of 65,535 characters or bytes.

Comments

[kunzite1]

i'd like to see this extended to the comment post form as well.

[ladysorka]

Definitely, yes. The number of times I've ended up having comments be too long is... high.

I've gotten to the point that anything longer than a paragraph or two, I automatically copy before posting.

[sofiaviolet]

Ooh, yes!

[beginning]

I'd like to see the comment version of this even more. I've never hit the max with posts, but I've done it many times with comments. I hate having to go back and guess where to break the comment into two...or three...

[afuna]

Back in July, I tried writing a greasemonkey script along these lines once. I don't have much experience so I don't know whether all implementations will suffer from the problems I ran into, but in short

[xcacophony]

If it would be too draining on the system to do it as you type each word, I'd love to be able to have something to click that'll tell you how many characters you've used up. That way if you want nothing to do with the feature, you can just ignore it.

Personally, I would find it especially useful either when I'm sending in a review through a comment or if I'm posting a chapter for NaNoWriMo, where I've run into the limit before (the entry posted, but it won't edit).

[jc]

It's false to imply that such a count creates a drain on the system, whether the system is the host server or the client computer: such counts already exist on textareas on other web sites, and although they don't necessarily go up to 65,535 the processing power required to make the calculation is microscopically tiny. (SpamCop for example places a 50-kilobyte [51,200-byte] limit on form input, and all it requires to enforce that limit and truncate input that exceeds it is a simple piece of JavaScript executed when the form is submitted.)

As to the suggestion itself, I don't see the point in displaying a count all the time, because users rarely hit or even come close to the limit. It might be more practical to display the count when the user hits the last 1,000 bytes.

[ruakh]

Yeah, I think it would make most sense to display the count only when the textarea's value is more than, say, 20,000 characters. (20,000 characters is sufficiently long that a user might start to wonder if he's going to hit some sort of entry limit; and since realistically, an entry isn't going to average more than 3 bytes per character, this means that users will have at least 1845 characters' warning before hitting the size limit, and probably much more.)

[pauamma]

Also, with 20000 characters, you'll have a good estimate of the average number of bytes per character, and you could use that to update an estimated count. That won't help in some cases, eg if the user pastes a largeish chunk of Chinese text at the end of a long post in English, but how common is that?

[snarkbite]

Agree with the sentiment of the suggestion, combined with something from the existing comments -- either warn you that you're about to hit the limit, or simply don't let you type/enter more than the allowed limit.

Another possible alteration would be that if you try to post an entry but it's over the limit, don't let you save the entry but don't eat the entry either.

Meaning, give you secondary page that still has all of your original entry text on it, but informs you that you've exceeded the limit by XXXX bytes or whatever. The one benefit here is that this allows a train of thought to not be interrupted (especially for comments, where it's much easier to hit the limit) -- you can rant/rave to your heart's content and *then* pare it down once you know it's too long. All of your original entry/comment is still there, and you can then do your thing to chop it down.

[ymf]

it's not so important for me to be able to see how many characters i have left, but it definitely IS important to know when i've hit the limit.

it's annoying to guess where you should break the entry!