Comments should be less than 5000 chars!

zhenlijiang

November 15, 2010, 11:06 AM posted in General Discussion

Since when?

CPod if this is real, then please provide a counter, so we can see how many chars we're running up.

kimiik

November 15, 2010, 11:53 AM

Is it a retroactive Commenting Policy ?

zhenlijiang

Not to flatter myself, but it's a counter-zhenlijiang Commenting Policy, haha.

But seriously--if so I want that counter in place please!

xiao_liang

November 15, 2010, 12:03 PM

Not sure that's right. I just checked one of my recent long entries and it was 5094 characters...

zhenlijiang

Well then it's really personal isn't it!

j/k. XiaoLiang this is really new, like just 1-hour old.

bababardwan

zhen,

Where are you getting this from? I've not seen or heard of it before, and I just quickly skimmed the comments policy and didn't spot it there [or did I miss it?]

ps I presume/hope this only applies to lesson threads. Otherwise what about the transcript threads?...I mean especially the transcript posts themselves? Maybe we'll have to apply for an exemption there, hehe. Is there a down on your knees begging emoticon? ..even better...how about a kowtowing emoticon? ..sorry, just kidding folks. I know CPod are entirely reasonable, but couldn't resist a little joking. :)

zhenlijiang

I posted my thoughts on your transcript translation--at first in full, which took. But I found an edit I wanted to make (the edit always messes up the text and html codes for color and such formatting) so I (again) deleted and tried to re-post--this time it didn't take. Got a dialogue box saying "Comment should be less than 5000 chars". This was just a couple of minutes later, so about an hour ago.

bababardwan

oh thanks zhen for explaining all that. My take on that [and I could well be wrong here] is that that is more of a tech glitch. Come to think of it, I suspect thats been around for at least a week or two. Ask paul. I think he was having trouble posting his full transcripts and they got broken down into smaller parts. I think if it was a new commenting policy we would probably have been told about it and it would also appear on the commenting policy page.

zhenlijiang

Baba yeah I'm only joking about new policy. If it were a new policy it would be announced, and the Commenting Policy revised. What I did think was, the website underwent another "minor" change that we weren't told about (has happened a lot this year!). So yeah hopefully it's just a glitch and will be corrected soon.

I felt sad when the site didn't take my comment, but certainly am not taking it personally! I don't believe in favored or vilified poddies. Like I said before, I'm sure CPod loves all, whether we're just Basic / Premium subscribers or using teacher services.

sebire

November 15, 2010, 12:14 PM

I've just tried entering 5001 characters of lorem ipsum. It failed. No more transcripts then.

xiao_liang

Hmn. That's not great. Perhaps a mail to the relevant person at Cpod (JohnB?) might be in order.

zhenlijiang

Done.

johnb

Received. :) Not sure what's causing it, but I'll raise the issue with the 相关部门 when they get into the office.

zhenlijiang

Thanks for looking into this immediately John. I do appreciate the response.

johnb

November 16, 2010, 06:20 AM

Hello all,

We've checked out the issue, and there is indeed a 5000 character limit set on the comments. I'm not sure when it was set, but according to our changelogs it should have been in July or August while fixing a number of issues with the comment system. You should have been informed, and I apologize that you weren't.

The limit is there for performance reasons, and is pretty infrequently hit. However, since you are hitting it, we're going to raise the cap to 10,000 characters. We don't think that that will cause any performance issues on our end, and should make it easier to post transcripts without running into the limit.

The update should be published later in the afternoon.

Thanks for you patience, and sorry again about the confusion.

xiao_liang

JohnB FTW :-)

zhenlijiang

Hi John,

Thank you for getting back to us so soon, and giving us such a clear explanation. That's funny, how some of these changes only become known to us months later. Same thing happened with this one ... but anyway, I am gratified to have my "Since when?" question answered!

And I appreciate very very much your taking the Transcripts Group activities (well, and a couple of other prolific users) into consideration and raising the limit. That's nice.

You know, we really aren't a bunch of impatient people here. I guess you weren't here for the bumpiest months of website changes and glitches this year, but this sort of response was missing most nearly throughout, which is why some of us turned into such vocal 'complainers'; we were so frustrated not just with the user experience but really the lack of CPod acknowledgement when we brought up issues. It was making us feel ignored every day and it was absolutely unnecessary to make users feel like they were being treated poorly.

So, very glad to really feel those days are in the past. 谢谢

bababardwan

haha. Thanks johnb, but my recent media transcript has blown your 10,000 character limit out of the water. It was 22,840 characters [ 27,378 characters if you wanna count the spaces...I'm not sure if your 10,000 limit counts the spaces? ] . Ah baba, problem child, hehe.

johnb

I'm pretty sure it counts spaces (they take the same amount of memory to store and bandwidth to transfer, which is the critical issue). For now, can you split it into a couple pieces and post them in a series? We want to make sure that the larger limit doesn't cause any problems before considering increasing the limit further. Sorry about the hassle!

bababardwan

hehe, no worries John. I just was having some sort of Dirty Harry moment [such fantasizing felt good actually, hehe] . Yeah, easily done and no point causing tech probs.