ottawa foodies

I just finished writing a lenghty review for 18 and I noticed a few minutes after I submitted it that my review had been truncated. I lost probably about a third of what I wrote. It has happened to me before and its a little heart breaking.

I am guessing this is a safety feature built in to protect from spam and people like me who can go on a bit at times. But I am wondering if it might be possible to increase the maximum length for the brevity challenged like myself. As well, is it possible to have a notification when you have gone over the maximum. I know the best thing to do is to write a post using a word processing program but I frequently just write on the site. I normally cop an entire post before I submit it but, without the warning I didn't realize that I lost a good chunk of text and by the time I did I had already, copy some other stuff.

Just to be clear: I am NOT complaining at all as I recognize the fault is entirely mine and I really do appreciate the efforts that go into making this site work!

I decide to delete the post for now and saved what I had in Word so that when I do post it will be complete.

Cheers.

Medicine Jar - As a long winded reviewer, I too occasionally have come across this "um - problem". What I now do is write up my reviews in a word processing program and cut and paste them onto the site. The advantage of this I have found is that I have plenty of opportunity to review my review for errors, spelling, etc. And after I post the info, if it should still become truncated, I am then able to go back using the EDIT feature, remove the review, and cut & paste it into the field in such a way that the break makes sense (for example, see my forum topic entitled Prince Edward County www.ottawafoodies.com )

Overall though I've decided that this was more "my problem" than one with the Website (like yourself I too agree that Fresh Foodie has been so generous in just providing this Website for our enjoyment and exchange of info). But, I agree it would be nice if there was someway of knowing when the "field" had reached or was close to reaching its maximum capacity. At least then I'd know ahead of time where I should put in page breaks.

Implementing active notification of the word limit is very high on my list of site improvements. I feel terrible when people lose something they've written. And it happens to me too!

I originally had a 1000 character limit because realistically nobody reads more than that. I later increased it arbitrarily to 2000 characters so genuine contributors are less likely to run into the limit. I know the current system is flawed and I will improve it as soon as I am able.

Thanks for the feedback. :-)

Hmmmmm...I've seen lots of websites that simply don't allow you to enter any more characters when you've reached the limit (although that's very annoying when you're not paying attention to the screen and type looking at the keyboard like a 5th grader - like I do lol). Would it be possible to get something like that maybe?

Ooh ooh ooh ooh: Or a Twitter-like running tally at the top so that you can see that you're at -500 characters and need to do some pruning to make it fit ;)

Maybe FF should just rewrite the whole site as AJAX? ;-)

But then how would I read the site in Lynx? ;)

The parentheses mangle the URL (FF, can we use escape characters or &-prefixed things to fix?), but en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

Okay thanks for your patience everyone! I've added a "characters remaining" count at the bottom of the large text entry boxes. Please let me know if you run into any problems.

If I'd known it would only take half an hour to implement and test I would have done it a long time ago.

Fresh Foodie - Nice new feature. Thanks for all you do to make this site so user friendly. We really appreciate it! (7,842 characters remaining) LOL.

Oh crap, this is fun. I wasn't expecting a real counter when I suggested it, but now I just plan on writing for the sake of writing. Thanks, FF!

Speaking of character limits, and referring back to one of my posts above, is anybody else on Twitter that I should know about? My username there is, naturally, momomoto. I'm severely considering an unlimited texting plan, simply so that I can take advantage of Twitter.

Hey, others post photos for the sake of posting photos, you might as well write for the sake of writing :-)

I'm on twitter technically, but I don't really use it. To me it seems to be like a broken facebook (which I use a lot).

..... and for those who post photo's for the sake of posting photos.... Why a limit of only one photo per posting ?

PS: I can't wait to see the 8000 character 'cut and paste' news clippings put up in here. Not that anyone ever puts news clippings up in here.

Wow, I still got over 7666 charcters left.

Zym: Yeah, I did add you even though you don't really use it. It is an interesting complement to Facebook (also blocked from work for me), but it sounds like the power users take advantage of Twitter by redirecting the Twitter messages to their cell phones.

I don't have a cell phone so guess I'll never be a 'power user' ;-)

Thanks very much for this and for all your efforts on the site!

Cheers as always!

I hardly ever use mine, and I see this as an excuse to get A) a new phone and B) a texting plan ;)

La la la... cool feature FreshFoodie (7952 left)