This happens to me a LOT, and it has seriously hampered how often I post here as a direct result. When I go to type into the comments section, it seems an AWFUL LOT OF THE TIME, the danged thing INSISTS I am over the limit, even though the 'max 4096 characters, x-number left' thing shows characters remaining unused!!!

Example. RIght NOW, I'm trying to post up an image, it is telling me that I have 43 characters left, and yet, EVERY TIME I go to hit upload-and-save, it returns the error telling me I am over limit!!!!!!

So which is it?????????? Do I have 43 left, and am NOT over the limit, or is the 43 free characters showing NOT an accurate statement??? If it's NOT accurate, maybe you might want to fix it??? Because it is VERY frustrating from the poster's point of view to try to put stuff in comments, see they have characters left over, and then they CANT SAVE the image because the system STILL insists they are OVER the allotted 4096 characters.

I miss NOT having that limit there. I really really do. I NEVER had this sort of problem until this was instituted in the gallery, and I have reached a point with this that I am SO sick and tired of fighting to get an image up because of the stupid character limit being buggy, that I have greatly reduced the number of image posts I'm making.

So what exactly is going on with this??? Why is it telling me I have 43 characters left (or however many), and then it still will NOT LET ME save the image on upload???? Why????

~ Seliah

Okay... I've gone through and tested this by adding literally ONE letter at a time and hitting 'save' on the edit function. We do NOT have the allotted 4096 characters. In fact, the moment it reaches '56 characters left'....it begins returning the error of being over the limit.

If it says you have 57 left, it will go through fine. But once you hit 56, it begins returning the error about being over limit, despite apparently having 56 characters left before hitting your limit of 4096.

Anyway. I don't understand this. And it's very frustrating for those of us who tend to post bits of the storyline that the artwork is immediately derived from. But you maybe might want to fix that line to read "max 4039 characters" and not "max 4096"... because we obviously do not have 4096 characters to use in our comments section.

~ Seliah

The problem lies with the "special" characters, like &, <, > and the like. Those have to be converted to HTML entities: &, < > and so on. As you can see, those "entities" take up quite a lot of characters.
Italics, bold or underline markers also add HTML to the text, as do newline characters.

This is probably the reason the character count is off. If you're getting close to the 4096 character limit, it could be off by 100 characters or thereabouts.

A smarter character counting routine would be highly appreciated, indeed!

I see that Seliah wants to know more about the inner workings of the,

'max 4096 characters, x-number left' ... in the comments section

i can't be certain ... but I'll try to give you an educated guess ... so if it turns
out that I'm wrong ... please don't hit me ... just kidding. 

That having been said, I did a little 'research' using your most recent upload ...
"Snapshots in Time 11- Ghosts of the Past" as the test case ... yes, I know that
in statistics, that would be called "small sample size".  [grin]

Methodology

I looked at the comments text as displayed and also the portion of the comments
text in the html coding for that image.  In both of those 2 observations, I copied the
'sample' into TextPad (TextPad is a very good, very flexible plain text editor that I
have been using for about 10 years).  TextPad has the ability to show me the word
and character count of a text document.  

Observations

Text as displayed     4014 characters      file size 4068 characters

HTML selection         4243 characters      file size 4203 characters

Analysis

The reason for the difference between displayed text vs. the HTML coding is
that there are some html tags that need to be generated for each paragraph
of your comments. 

The reason for the difference between the character count and the file size is
due to the number of lines in the scrap of text in the TextPad buffer... you see, 
each line of text has 2 control characters (CR and LF) to indicate the end of the
line ... TextPad shows me the number of characters and also the number of
characters plus the number of CR+LF characters. 

Conclusion

I suspect that while typing, some local java script code is counting the characters
you type into a buffer in your local PC ... but when you submit what you entered,
some code on the renderosity server parses your comment into HTML code (that 
program adds whatever HTML tags are needed) counts that expanded number
of characters against the 4096 limit. 

Advice

Type the comments into a text editor such as (TextPad) and check the number of
characters you typed ... in TextPad, that would be "View" -> "Document Properties". 
In TextPad you can know the number of lines by using Crtl+End to place the cursor
at the end of your text.  Multiply the number of lines by 4 and add that to the file size
characters ... if that is over 4096, you will probably have a problem when you submit. 

HTH ... but always remember that YMMV ...

--
Martin
p.s. TextPad can also spell check. 

I see that while I was considering this issue and composing my reply,
both Seliah and svdl were also considering this question. 

Thanks to Seliah for her additional observations with a well thought methodology. 

I have a question ... in the 56 vs. 57 characters left, how many paragraphs? (BTW,
blank lines count as a paragraph) ... 16 paragraphs would be consistent with my
suggestion. 

Thanks to svdl who was thinking along the same lines as I ... and was more sucinct
in his response.  BTW, a newline in text takes 2 characters (CR+LF) while a newline
in renderosity HTML takes 6 characters (less than sign, B R space slash and greater
than sign). 

IMO, mystery solved. 

--
Martin

MGD -

Thanks for the explanation. Yup, that helps explain a lot.

Er. My count on paragraphs (counting blank lines also) was 27 paragraphs.

Thanks guys. Yup, definitely solved. LOL

~ Seliah

Well I finally got tired of trying to figure it out tonight and jut posted mine in the writer's gallery with a much smaller image. Math gives me a horrid headache!

Ya know... I probably should be posting my stuff into the writer's gallery, now that I think about it. A lot of it really is accompanied by bits of storyline. LMAO

~ Seliah

Mine was a bit longer, a shoert story and it's way too much has to cut for galleries.

I put the first part in Bryce gallery with a full sized image.
But had to cut the second image for the second part.

wish we could put a larger image over in Writer's Gallery instead linking to it...sigh.

From what I hear, the maximum image size in the gallery is different from the maximum image size for something uploaded to the Writer's gallery ... is that the issue? 

What are those limits?  Where does renderosity document those limits? 

Thanks

--
Martin

Quote - From what I hear, the maximum image size in the gallery is different from the maximum image size for something uploaded to the Writer's gallery ... is that the issue? 

What are those limits?  Where does renderosity document those limits? 

Thanks

--
Martin

Regular gallery is 4000x4000, Writers is 450x450.
These are noted on the upload screen. Once you select a gallery section from the dropdown, the text underneath the "Select an image to upload" box displays the maximum sizes for the section that you chose.

Thanks to KarenJ for her answer,

Regular gallery is 4000x4000, Writers is 450x450

Are the text limits also provided (spelled out) in the same manner? 

BTW, I don't know where to find the limits (both file size and text size) for messages posted in the forums ... could you elaborate? 

Could you suggest that information appear in the forum message upload page(s)? 

Thanks ...

--
Martin

Quote -
Are the text limits also provided (spelled out) in the same manner? 

Yes.

Quote -
BTW, I don't know where to find the limits (both file size and text size) for messages posted in the forums ... could you elaborate? 

To my knowledge, there is no character limit in the forums.

Thanks to KarenJ for responding,

To my knowledge, there is no character limit in the forums

OK

What about image file size limits and image pixel limits in the forums? 

--
Martin

Oh you mean on the attachments to posts? There is no height/width limit. I believe the max file weight is 250kb but I don't think it's noted anywhere until you try to upload something too big and it says that you can't. I'll check that out and see about having it added somewhere appropriate.

Actually the file limit in the forums  is 200kb a little smaller then the gallery

I see that SndCastie tells us that,

the file limit in the forums is 200kb

OK

Now I want to be sure ... what are the pixel limits (minimum, maximum, range, etc,  ...) in the forums? 

Thanks ...

--
Martin

There is no min there is a max of 200 kb for image