Darned title limits

April 15, 2015 1:21 PM

Just curious, but what's the maximum length allowed for:
* usernames
* profile pages
* posts
* comments
posted by Chrysostom to MetaFilter-Related at 1:21 PM (40 comments total)

Usernames are, I believe, capped at fifty characters even, though most folks go a lot shorter than that. (Someone could calculate the distribution of username lengths using the username data in The Infodump pretty easily if they're curious.)

I believe at this point posts, comments, and profile pages allow for functionally arbitrarily long content; that is, I don't know for sure there isn't some large strict upper limit being enforced, and I imagine if you go big enough there's practical limits in where the db or the server might start horking even if not.

But in any case, in practice something is more likely to become a problem of presentation before it reaches a technical limit. Posting the Treaty of Westphalia or, less jokingly, pasting a giant pile of text from elsewhere instead of linking it, is a good way to get a comment deleted, and the odd mega-megapost aside posts just don't end up being terribly long in general.

Profile pages we've never really had a reason to worry about length on since it's hardly getting in anyone else's way if you just go wordy on yours.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:25 PM on April 15, 2015

More specifically: what's the maximum length for muffins recipes?


okay okay
posted by Namlit at 1:29 PM on April 15, 2015

30-35 minutes. Any more than that and I get hungry and eat something else while I'm waiting.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:30 PM on April 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

Yep, just confirming that usernames have a 50-character maximum.
posted by pb (staff) at 1:30 PM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was just looking at this post today, which is uber-long. Not sure there's one longer.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 1:30 PM on April 15, 2015

Oh, wait - there's this Homestuck one by rorgy.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 1:32 PM on April 15, 2015

The Infodump has a set of post length files as well, speaking of; if you wanted to get a quick index of the longest posts ever, that'd be a good place to start, though note it's counting raw characters rather than differentiating between display text and the content of e.g. href tags. There's some details on the wiki for the curious.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:35 PM on April 15, 2015

(Although it should have occurred to me that you might be able to search that on Combustible Edison Lighthouse's tool for playing with Infodump data, the wonderful Infodumpster. It turns out you can in fact find the longest posts easily that way.)
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:38 PM on April 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yep, just confirming that usernames have a 50-character maximum.

It's Raining Florence Henderson is just my nickname.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:43 PM on April 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I thought the comment size limit was Len(TREATY_OF_WESTPHALIA) - 1.
posted by uosuaq at 1:47 PM on April 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: the server might start horking
posted by Chairboy at 2:18 PM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was just looking at this post today, which is uber-long.

Holy shit. My thumb literally started to hurt scrolling to the end of that on my phone. Not even clicking on the rorgy one. (It also makes me a little sad that there's not a single thing in life I care that much about. No matter how passionate I am about a topic by link four I'd be like "Fuck it, that'll do.")
posted by billiebee at 2:20 PM on April 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

BTW I'm assuming that's 'horking' as in the noise that cats make when they have a furball the size of the Treaty of Westphalia?
posted by Chairboy at 2:20 PM on April 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yep, just confirming that usernames have a 50-character maximum.

I can confirm that this is true.
posted by When choosing your username make sure you plan ahe at 2:37 PM on April 15, 2015 [45 favorites]

Woah user #222222!
posted by Rumple at 2:45 PM on April 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

🎉
posted by ocherdraco at 2:47 PM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Woah user #222222!

BEST DAY EVER.
posted by When choosing your username make sure you plan ahe at 3:00 PM on April 15, 2015 [24 favorites]

Can I just call you Deuce?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:14 PM on April 15, 2015

I volunteer to test the comment size limit.
posted by Treaty of Westphalia at 3:34 PM on April 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

my next sockpuppet is just going to be called 5 dollar joke
posted by poffin boffin at 3:50 PM on April 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

Quick someone post the treaty of Westphalia 3 times to see if we can hit the functional limit.

Edit: Damn it beaten by the first comment :(
posted by Carillon at 4:03 PM on April 15, 2015

Don't do it! If you repeat the Treaty of Westphalia 3 times, the Dutch Republic appears behind you!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:06 PM on April 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

This userdump talk inspired me to do a quick search on something cortex and I talked about in email a while back. There are 81 users with some combination of "sock" and "puppet" in their names (which I guess is short enough to post here if people are curious).
posted by exogenous at 4:09 PM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

There are a lot more that make some kind of coy reference to socks.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:13 PM on April 15, 2015

Actually not - only 48 containing "socks" according to cat usernames.txt | grep socks
posted by exogenous at 4:18 PM on April 15, 2015

No - I mean stuff like medium blue stocking.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:19 PM on April 15, 2015

I believe at this point posts, comments, and profile pages allow for functionally arbitrarily long content; that is, I don't know for sure there isn't some large strict upper limit being enforced, and I imagine if you go big enough there's practical limits in where the db or the server might start horking even if not.

Without actually posting I could preview 80,640 words without problems, but at 161,280 words preview seem to bork - it previewed half and then just hung (that's zoomed out to 25% - you can see by the scroll bar how much is not visible). That word count is using MS Word so YMMV.

Of course I was also nervously hoping I wasn't horking the server for anybody besides me just by previewing, so I may not have let the preview try as long as I could have.
posted by barchan at 4:35 PM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

And just for context, the longest comment via the Infodump was ~37,000 words.
posted by barchan at 4:58 PM on April 15, 2015

exogenous: "Actually not - only 48 containing "socks" according to cat usernames.txt | grep socks"

$ grep -rc socks usernames.txt
48

$ grep -rc sock usernames.txt
229

Of course, many sockpuppet accounts are much more obliquely named.
posted by Treaty of Westphalia at 5:24 PM on April 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

For example, you are *really* The Treaty of Paris.
posted by Chrysostom at 5:39 PM on April 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

Ah, thanks for the -rc tip on grep. Not my area of expertise: I piped the output to a text file and then imported into Excel to count rows. For the record, my sock/puppet search was

cat usernames.txt | grep sock | grep puppet > sockpuppets.txt

posted by exogenous at 8:15 PM on April 15, 2015

The max comment length is 256 KB, or at least it was in 2011. (I stuffed a bunch of data in the 'title' attributes so that the bulk wouldn't be visible when making that test.)
posted by Rhomboid at 1:51 AM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Just stopping by to ask what the maximum diameter is for snowflakes.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 4:09 AM on April 20, 2015

Observed limit appears to be fifteen inches.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:37 AM on April 20, 2015

Where did the entire Treaty of Westphalia in-joke come from? Because it's not actually that long: 14 800 words, 88 000 characters. Which according to Word's Word Count is only 10 000 characters longer than the longest ever MeFi post.

In comparison (because I have too much free time and I did a pointless thing): The Treaty of Versailles is around 77 000 words, 460 000 characters.

(Also, what does the Length column at the infodumpster actually show? It puts the longest-ever comment at 119653 somethings, but Word claims the post is 78 171 characters long.)
posted by Pyrogenesis at 7:26 AM on April 21, 2015

Treaty of Westphalia info on the Mefi wiki.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:32 AM on April 21, 2015

The Treaty of Versailles won't fit into a comment.
posted by double block and bleed at 8:33 PM on April 21, 2015

cortex: It turns out you can in fact find the longest posts easily that way.

Ha! I don't even crack the top 20.

I'm such a slacker.
posted by zarq at 4:01 AM on April 24, 2015

Oh.

That mathowie guy is very active in metatalk.
posted by zarq at 4:08 AM on April 24, 2015

Observed limit appears to be fifteen inches.

What's the conversion from inches to schnitzengruben?
posted by a halcyon day at 4:39 PM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]