... on the other hand, Mark's posts are generally unreadable, because they are too long. Maybe putting a 200-word limit on posts would encourage brevity.
That's a generalization that only applies to a subset of forum members.
Not everyone finds them unreadable, but find my posts to be their favourite. Perhaps a sort of love and hate, of course, but that's what makes UrbanToronto so popular! I've also added "
TL;DR" to some of them. Also, I've intentionally carefully formatted some of my big posts (
see above link) to make them more readable than before.
Others do big posts too. Look at our resident GO train driver
vegata_skyline, he is one of our most famous forum members, and he posted more than 10,000 characters a few times, including this one:
Positive Train Control (third post, by vegata_skyline)
Does UrbanToronto want to repel people like these too? It's a double edged sword: "Do I want to reduce those annoying long posts, or do I want to keep our best forum members like vegata_skyline?". The most enthusastic forum members like me and him, do a lot of referrals to UrbanToronto -- I tell people this is the best place in for general GTHA transportation discussion forums, including in the comments section of some mainstream papers. We aren't the comments section of the Sun newspaper.
Transportation subject matters are certainly a matter of cerebral importance -- just see those big posts made by other favorite people! The pros of not putting a post size limit can massively outweigh the cons. Just let administrators manually police the inappropriate big posts -- problem solved (Yes, I've been reprimanded for one of the posts already
but also complimented for many other posts in other PMs by other everyday forum members).
Keep the character limits to twitter where everybody stays to the point -- not to forums like these.
Filtering those best posts can reduce the average IQ level of a discussion forum, as some lurkers here have almost certainly registered solely because of good posts by specific members (e.g. reading vegata_skyline's posts).
P.S. I already registered
www.hamlrt.ca via GoDaddy for an upcoming Hamilton LRT blog, so I might begin to move some of my big texts offline to annoy fewer people, and post smaller here, but still -- 10,000 is way too small for star forum members (not myself). Generally, on forums throughout the Internet, star forum members tend to be master alpha in word-of-mouth helping make forums popular, so I treat them like treasure as part of my forum membership of my own forum website operations, including removing post size limits.