Exempt content warning character count from counting against toot length

[kmosiejczuk]

Exempt character count from content warning from counting against 500 character limit

We already exempt parts of toots from counting against the character count: URLs (mostly), image captions. Yes, this could be abused. I was thinking not applying the exemption on toots where the CW is longer than the toot body could solve most of the problems. (I was envisioning people doing infinite length CWs). That and/or having a separate character limitation for CWs themselves. i.e. 100 characters for CW and 500 for the body. Something like this could allow folks to use more specific, spelled out CWs.

I'm suggesting this because I keep seeing toots and boosts about not using abbreviations in CWs. While some of the abbreviations are probably folks who don't want to type things out, I know that I've had problems fitting toots into the space left after a proper CW.

[Packbat]

Of the two suggestions, I'd support the separate character limit on CWs - I think that makes more sense anyway, as a "this is how much real estate we want to limit toots to" thing.

For reference when figuring what a good default limit would be: as someone on an instance with an absurdly long character limit and therefore no practical limit on CW length, the longest of my own CWs from the past week was 130-something characters, and the longest I boosted was a little over 200 characters.

[MirceaKitsune]

I didn't even know that CW counts for the maximum character length, it always looked like a separate field. I'm inclined to agree with your suggestion: 100 character limit for CW field, leave the 500 character limit separate just for the post body.

There is however a case in which this can be annoyingly abused, and I figure the current design was meant precisely to prevent it: People using the CW field as a way to increase the character limit of their post. Some users might get lazy when they reach the 500 character limit of a post and say "haha, I'll be smart and put the first sentence in the content warning field". This will lead to ugly looking and deformed posts which might not even make any sense.

[realityfabric]

There is however a case in which this can be annoyingly abused, and I figure the current design was meant precisely to prevent it: People using the CW field as a way to increase the character limit of their post.

I don't even know why we have a 500 character limit for posts. Without such a small limit this entire issue wouldn't exist.

[Packbat]

Doing a very rough estimate based on the size of my outbox.json file and number of posts it contains, as someone on an instance with a 7777 character limit under CWs, I think my average post is a little under 500 characters. Even including my long posts. I've never used up half that character limit.

Sharing as a reference point for people wondering how much wordier people would post with no character limit.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[tehstu]

The user experience could be improved here. If the system is performing a validation, it should inform the user. I was nearly at the character count limit, but under it, and could not understand why I was told I could not post. Eventually deduced that the Content Warning counted towards the total character count.

My suggestion for change, which I'm happy to write up as a separate suggestion, is that characters entered into the Content Warning visibly count towards the character count.