[Discussion] Blog lengths

[Vusys]

There has been a lot of chatter about the length of blogs, with a lot of people saying that short blogs are not good. I introduced a limit of 141 characters to a blog to help ease this, however this may or may not be enough to combat the ‘problem’.

In my personal opinion, people should be allowed to blog whatever they want. If you don’t like it because of content, size, style or whatever then don’t click “I like this”. I may introduce some kind of negative like in the future, similar to Reddit and Digg in the future too. My problem with introducing a higher limit is that it would create a void between fragments and blogs where nothing can be posted. Say there is a limit of 500 characters, and you want to post something that’s 300 characters. You’re in a position where you must either add 200 extra characters to bring it up to the limit or make three fragments.

So, what limits would you like on blogs?

[Blackboy0]

😐

141 characters… Noice 😛

I say the minimum is 150, and the maximum is… 15,000?

Cause we don’t want HUGE Blogs over 15,000+ words 😉

[FunnyFroggy]

Pft, of course we do. Don’t be a poosay. :3

[Jil]

150 is less arbitrary 😛

What’s the character limit on sigs, by the way?
nm:

Please note:
1. Your signature can be text only.
2. HTML and BBCode will not be parsed.
3. There is a 250 character limit.

I think fragments should be the same, and blogs be 251+

[MasterCheeze]

Hmm….

1.) Fragments = 1-150 characters
2.) Signature = 0-250 characters
3.) Blog = 150+ words
4.) Thread = 5+ words (maybe this one so the limit in a thread is like, a five word question/statement)

Maybe changing the blog limit from characters to words should take care of it. I guess a gap will hae to be there, but either way people have about three choices in what to post: a short blip about something (Fragment), a quick statement, question, or point of matter (which could be a thread), or a full-out blog. There you have short, medium, and large. There is no medium-large or medium-small, and anything bigger than large just gets treated as large since there isn’t anything else.

[David]

This is what I think:

[Jil]

^ Double Spammer award pls. 🙂

What I don’t like about word counts is that they don’t treat everything equally. – 14 words

“a b c d e f g h i j k l m n” – 14 words

[David]

Annona said: ^ Double Spammer award pls. 🙂

What I don’t like about word counts is that they don’t treat everything equally. – 14 words

“a b c d e f g h i j k l m n” – 14 words

T.T

I mean, the whole situation = fail. MMOTales didn’t really have limits, but then the community was really small… I thought the fragment system was great – 140 is a standard we can live with fine. 🙂

It’s really fine – I think so anyway.

[Aaru]

Why are we bickering about blog lengths?

If it has to be a set limitation on the counts of words, 141 characters. It’d be way too small.

I suggest that we use a one paragraph limitation, no less than 5 sentences instead. Either way it wouldn’t be so hard to count characters, or words, and it be easier to just count the periods at the end of each sentence. It wouldn’t be way to small nor would it be to challenging for those who barely write blogs to begin with.

What do you guys think?

[Mipsacri]

My two cents:

We’re all responsible people. I say we all step up to the plate and just start posting longer blogs, less spam, instead of pussyfooting around the issue like were children who need to moderate it through word counts.

I guess it would put less stress on Vu if we did have a word count in place, but I think that maybe we should be a little more considerate and just start doing our own part.

~Mip

[FunnyFroggy]

That was three. :3

[Jil]

ffs

Fragments are fragments, blogs are blogs. Automated length requirements on the basis of “this could be a fragment instead” are kind of silly.

I was going to say something more (two things actually), but I’ll save the first for Vusys and the second for if/when it’s necessary.

[tarheel91]

141 is not arbitrary.

PLEASE READ THIS EVERYONE.
A text message can only have 140 characters in it. No more. If you want to turn the fragments into tweets, they need to be no more than 140 characters. Thus, REAL blogs have to be 141. I don’t know why Vusys hasn’t made this clear yet.

[MasterCheeze]

Uhhhh, you totally blew my mind, Potato. Maybe if I was still in school I’d try to comprehend that, but, uh… no. Not today. I’ll come back to this thread at the end of August and try to make sense out of what you said.

I’ll go with Mip since her post isn’t confusing. I think the reason there’s an automated way of separating things is because VuTales is out for the long run of things. I mean, yeah, the amount of us that are already here that know about the situation at hand, but this site should hopefully attract a lot more members (including spammers) that won’t abide by the rules. That is why this is a problem.

[Jil]

tarheel91 said: 141 is not arbitrary.

PLEASE READ THIS EVERYONE.
A text message can only have 140 characters in it. No more. If you want to turn the fragments into tweets, they need to be no more than 140 characters. Thus, REAL blogs have to be 141. I don’t know why Vusys hasn’t made this clear yet.

A quick Google: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html
160. Twitter/whatever reserves 20 bytes for headers/whatnot.
But why does that matter? For the site’s purposes it’s pretty arbitrary, unless you’re planning to let people text VuTales to post their fragments.

-.- @ Cheeze
What I mean to say is that just because anything under 140 characters can go in a fragment instead, doesn’t mean that it should go in a fragment. In certain situations it may be more suitable for a blog, although, granted, 140 characters is extremely short.

In reality if someone wants to spam, they will spam. They’d use 141 @’s or whatever. And if someone really wants to post a short blog, they’ll sandwich in a lot of whitespace.
You could argue that it might make people think twice about it before doing such a thing, but you can accomplish that that without enforcing a stringent limit. Direct people to a rules page on sign-up. Display a word count, which is already done. If you even want to, make an “Are you sure you want to post such a short blog?” alert box. But setting automatic limits only encourages people to bypass it if it gets in their way, which I think is really counter-productive.

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