Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Current status. No more than 500... (ANSWERED)

Why?
I ask not just because I am literate, but also I would like to know why the restriction? To allow a person to voice/write their current status, yet condemn them to a controlled count. Is it possible to at least extend it to 800 characters?

Five hundred seems to have been the setting for that interface as it appears to be based on the Kudos text box, which is also 500. Don’t know why there are limits on status or kudos, but I’m sure there are reasons.

if there was no character limit, people could just post the whole Bee Movie script- ...I mean, not me of course I would NEVER

Thank you for your replies. It was originally brought to my attention yesterday while filling out an online form on the local council website requesting a new bin and discovering I could use up to 1000 characters, while RPR designed for writers has a limit of 500 in regard to current status and as Rogue Scribe pointed out, kudos.
I have noticed there is also a character limit on names, page titles, and tag lines. 26 characters I believe are allowed, again a strange number. Quite amusing.

A character limit is in everyone's best interest.

It is 2x the limit of a tweet so you should be able to fit your current status within it. And if you can't you could always write it up in a Google Doc and link it within the status.

People make-do with 280 on Twitter lmao

I think that for the statuses, the goal was mostly just to have a dedicated way for folks to let others know if they're just... available or not, or going through a slow period, etc. Not so much for getting detailed about why or sharing whole life updates.

As many people have noted here --

The statuses are meant for mini updates about people's status and availability, not for RP or long journal entries. They are kept short so that they do not overtake people's home feeds, where they are monitoring other things like active RPs. They are also temporary, with each new status completely replacing the last, making them a bad place to invest tons of writing energy.

The page title limits have a number of technical and design reasons behind that particular number.

If you really want to go long, text widgets, forum posts, character journals and direct messages have a limit more like 65,000 characters.

There's a limit of 15 widgets per profile page, so if you made all 15 of them text widgets, that would be 9,750,000 characters per profile page, or 475,000 more than are in the average 250-page book intended for consumption by adults. Or, looked at another way -- enough text to crash most browsers!

In short -- limits happen where long essays might be inappropriate toward other people's space and time. Where real RP is meant to happen, the limits are quite lofty and chosen only out of technical requirements.