Sam Harris

I am not thrilled about the new format’s size limit on posts, as once a debate really gets going, responses can get long.  I can live with it though, since I can just break up replies into multiple posts.

But what really boils my blood is the what happens when you use the preview feature to see if you have exceeded the size limit (you can’t always trust the character counter, because if you paste in paragraphs, it doesn’t update the remaining characters, so you won’t know how much space you have left until you preview).  I have discovered that if your post exceeds the permitted size, and you see a negative number in the character counter, indicating you have posted too much, when you try to trim some of what you wrote away by highlighting a portion of the text and hitting the delete button, EVERYTHING you wrote gets deleted.

This is infuriating, and it really needs to be fixed.

How much longer do you think the maximum size should be?

About double the current length would be nice, but really, that capacity to delete as-yet-unposted text if you try to edit something that’s too long is the real issue.  I can live with the length limits, but it’s maddening to have something you’ve just spent several minutes typing disappear into the ether.

Another problem I’ve noticed (and which others also have, no doubt, and commented upon as well), and which seems to be getting worse, not better, is the periodic unresponsiveness of this board.  I’ve had to deal with it several times this morning, and once about twenty minutes go, in an unsuccessful attempt to post this very message.

Sometimes, when trying to get to the forum from the main site, you simply can’t get there.  You click on the link to go to the forum, and nothing happens.  You have to wait an try again later.

On other occasions, while trying to post a message, or while simply trying to go to a thread and read it, the connection times out, and you get either “cannot find server,” or “the page cannot be displayed.”

This is intensely irritating, and I hoping it’s something that can be fixed.