Forum post character limit increased

[KisaiTenshi]

To those wondering about character limits. One of the reasons forum/server admins set these limits is to prevent database issues.
SQL Server admins know what I mean. Say on avg. Your threads are 5-10 pages. Then you may have one thread that is 3000 pages+. It causes that part of the table not to be optimized which can in turn slow or bottleneck another area.

Imagine if we had 20k posts.. times that by so many. It could cause things to choke up if the server isnt tuned right.

I remember when a phpBB2 forum I ran hit about page 100 for a thread... anyone with administrative privileges were no longer able to view the forum, because the administrative privilege did something that required looking at every post.

Most forums today tend to store threads in one table (eg the first post minus the body of the text), and the post body in another table, and the actual process of assembling a thread is something like "get post startat to display limit from post body table, thread table".

There's also two kinds of text fields, one is char/varchar, which is indexable, and another which is basically "text/blob" which is not indexable. So the search process typically has to create a keyword counter every time a post is created or edited, and it needs to be rebuilt every so often. Take note that if you try to search anything on this forum, it usually won't go back before 2017, because that hits the 20 page search limit. However if you go to google and search the forum, you can find posts all the way back from 2013.

At any rate, the limit is very specifically a vBulletin thing.
AdminCP > Settings > Options > Message Posting and Editing Options > Maximum Characters per Post

The limit really doesn't matter except to curtail spam, and "quote" pyramids. If something else was the issue, it's not Vbulletin, PHP or the underlying SQL server imposing it.

[Sove92]

At any rate, the limit is very specifically a vBulletin thing.
AdminCP > Settings > Options > Message Posting and Editing Options > Maximum Characters per Post

The limit really doesn't matter except to curtail spam, and "quote" pyramids. If something else was the issue, it's not Vbulletin, PHP or the underlying SQL server imposing it.

That is not the limit SE is using for these forums. The built-in limit applies to all posts, on everybody, on all sections and it cannot be bypassed by editing. They are using their own vB hack to do this, so they could impose the limits to certain sections, while keeping sections like bug reports unlimited. Needless to say, it's not coded very well.