Dunno if this bothers anyone else, but extremely long descriptions are making my tagging history, and others', a pain to scroll through.

Would it be reasonable to impose some sort of character limit on descriptions?

If you'd like an example of what I am talking about, here's one:
https://e621.net/post/show/341569

My apologies if you find the image unpleasant.

I'm not saying it should be super short either, but around a paragraph in length should really be all that's needed.

Unless I'm totally off base with this, and that's the sort of use this was intended for.
In which case, feel free to ignore me.

I say we should limit the descriptions like the blips. 200 characters maximum

A character limit would be nice, if we could find a happy-medium for length. That, and having it so you can collapse the description field, and maybe have it collapsed by default so you don't have to scroll through a bunch of fluff to get to the comments section.

Rocket_Corgi said:
A character limit would be nice, if we could find a happy-medium for length. That, and having it so you can collapse the description field, and maybe have it collapsed by default so you don't have to scroll through a bunch of fluff to get to the comments section.

Collapsing wouldn't be necessary with a good length cap.

Many pictures are uploaded to FA with a short accompanying story. I think that's exactly the sort of thing that ought to go in descriptions.

Are there really that many description fields which are extremely long and causing you trouble or is more of a personal peeve? Perhaps Aurali or Tony would do a DB query to answer how many pictures have a description of more than, say, 1000 characters? Or finer grained statistics if they care to provide them.

I'm not opposed to the idea of making it collapsible but putting it to a default of collapsed seems like it would really defeat the purpose of having it in the first place. I can pretty much guarantee you that the number of people who would ever bother to read them in that case would be very low.

Certainly not just a personal peeve.
Collapsing wouldn't solve the issue with tag history pages.
Unless they added a collapse to that page as well.

The problem is actually magnified by the tag history page because it puts the whole description into a small column.
some descriptions are so long I have to page down 6-7 times, or more just to get to the next set of tags.

One of the big reasons, from what I understand, for adding the description field was so that artists/character owners could add information to a picture that wouldn't be valid tags under TWYS.
Full multi-paragraph stories aren't necessary.
If someone really wants to add one, they can always link to it.

I'm either for:
a) limit characters
or
b) Make description collapsible, and limit visible characters in tag_history (like make visible 50 characters, and rest of it visible in new tab only after clicking on it), or maybe make description history separate from tags.

And I think b) is better.

If someone really wants to add one, they can always link to it.

I remember times when I wanted to check source in FA, but couldn't view it because I didn't have an account there, and can't register, because it wasn't working. For months. So I'm not against adding text here, even though it's also somewhere else.

It should be collapsible on both pages or get its own history in my opinion.

I'm all for long descriptions but they do get in they way if you wish to quickly check some tag changes.

If we limit descriptions, the reason for having them would stop existing. But yes. I forsaw this problem once.. I thought I put a limiter in tag history.. must have been overwritten.

NotMeNotYou said:
It should be collapsible on both pages or get its own history in my opinion.

I'm all for long descriptions but they do get in they way if you wish to quickly check some tag changes.

Yea why not just put it in a Section Dtext command and be done with it. Since people may want to read the story even if it is ridiculously long.

I propose:

Moving description history to its own page, since there's no room left in the tag history table. (Flagging history is in its own page, too).

Allowing description sections to be collapsed, similar to DText section tags.

Allowing users to enable an option to collapse descriptions by default, and require a click to view the entire description.

Adding a new meta tag, order:desclength, to find the worst offenders (and maybe even spam/vandalism) and correcting them if they can be shortened.

I'm not all that comfortable adding a length limit to descriptions because it's still a brand new system, and we don't really know if longer descriptions are a good or bad thing yet. If we did limit it, I'd probably suggest at least allowing two or three paragraphs of text.

tony311 said:
I propose:

Moving description history to its own page, since there's no room left in the tag history table. (Flagging history is in its own page, too).

Allowing description sections to be collapsed, similar to DText section tags.

Allowing users to enable an option to collapse descriptions by default, and require a click to view the entire description.

Adding a new meta tag, order:desclength, to find the worst offenders (and maybe even spam/vandalism) and correcting them if they can be shortened.

...

If all that gets added, I'd say a length limit isn't necessary.
Sounds fantastic.

tony311 said:
I propose:

[Words]

I'm in favor of all of this.

And there should be a limit, otherwise you could misuse it by encoding data, pasting it there and then decoding it somewhere else.

Wouldn't be the first time someone used a couple hundred base64 encoded URL's (or in this case a limitless textsection) to transmit movies, or things in that direction.

tony311 said:
Allowing users to enable an option to collapse descriptions by default, and require a click to view the entire description.

That would be in the user settings, right?

NotMeNotYou said:
I'm in favor of all of this.

Count two on it.

And there should be a limit, otherwise you could misuse it by encoding data, pasting it there and then decoding it somewhere else.

That reminded me of something that I have to report.

Wouldn't be the first time someone used a couple hundred base64 encoded URL's (or in this case a limitless textsection) to transmit movies, or things in that direction.

People really did that?

Xch3l said:
People really did that?

I heard of someone doing it some years ago, I did it with a .zip archive to bypass the school filter.

Had to get a couple documents home and my email was blocked and I didn't own a zip-drive at the time.

I made an entry for descriptions in the rules page. It covers long descriptions. People creating absurdly long descriptions should be reported. But let the admins decide whether or not they should be deleted.

tony311 said:
I propose:

Moving description history to its own page, since there's no room left in the tag history table. (Flagging history is in its own page, too).

Allowing description sections to be collapsed, similar to DText section tags.

Allowing users to enable an option to collapse descriptions by default, and require a click to view the entire description.

Point #1 and #2 sound good to me.
Point #3 sounds pretty good but do you mean have something like "a whole bunch of characters about foxes fucking and then sudd[click to view more]" in addition to a collapse which is un-collapsed by default. Am I understanding that correctly?

Adding a new meta tag, order:desclength, to find the worst offenders (and maybe even spam/vandalism) and correcting them if they can be shortened.

What do you mean by correcting them if they can be shortened?

I'm not all that comfortable adding a length limit to descriptions because it's still a brand new system, and we don't really know if longer descriptions are a good or bad thing yet.

I agree entirely.