Character Count Limits?

[Xamusel]

Before I start this thread's suggestion, I'd like to give a bit of backstory, and ask a question.

For those of you who know me as an author, I tend to write big chapters, at least by amount of words per chapter. If I ever write below something like 6-7k words, it's because it's supposed to be a simple prologue, meant to introduce a few things.

Now, I dunno how many characters are in each word of my chapters on average, but I'd assume something like 4-6 characters per word. In any case, my question is this: What's the limit on character count per forum post supposed to be, and is there ever a good reason to up the limit?

My reason for asking is because I don't want to split up a chapter at an inopportune time in the story.... that make sense?

My suggestion for this thread is that the forum has an upper limit of 250k characters (counting spaces) per post. That way, stuff like RolePlays get to have longer introductory posts, and nobody gets mad that their chapters are too long (okay, I'll be honest, that's just a number based on the current size of one of my documents in character amount... and it's all the same story, with multiple chapters in it, so that I know where it all is... the current number of characters in that document is 246821 characters with spaces attached).

[Cherry Lover]

I'm not actually sure what the limit is off the top of my head, but unless someone gives me a reason to do otherwise I don't intend it to be set so that it really limits anyone. Have you actually hit it at all, or are you asking just in case?

250k for a post is pretty insane, though. That's a quarter of a million characters, which is over 2,500 lines of writing. That is so much of a wall of text that people are going to get annoyed scrolling past it....

[Xamusel]

Actually, I did hit it, over in the thread Gundam: SEEDed Chronicles of 00 (it was after the first post, in two of the posts after lantz commented on, which was a chapter that was over 18k words long, I believe, and well more than that in character length).

[Cherry Lover]

Hmm, OK.

Well, I checked, and it's currently 50,000 characters. If people are hitting it then I would say changing it is probably not a bad idea, although I think 250,000 is pushing it a bit....

I'll see what the others have to say about it.

[Xamusel]

Thanks. That's all I can say.

Oh, by the way, the chapter in question? It was over 100k characters (counting spaces)... exact number being 102450 characters.

[Cherry Lover]

Wow, that is insane. I guess we can probably make it slightly over 100,000 characters just to accomodate that, although really that is an overly-long chapter....

[Xamusel]

You don't know the half of it... I once wrote a chapter that was over 35k words as the max I'd ever write for one chapter... don't remember how many characters that was altogether.

Of course, I'll never write that much again, but I feel that something like 150k characters is better safe than sorry.