Increase the text buffer limit.

Right now the maximum amount of text that can be sent in a message seems to be right around 256 characters. How would everyone like this increased, and how technically feasible do you think this would be?
Tapestries muck has a buffer limit of around 1024 characters, This has been fair for normal posts, but when I'm getting real descriptive I can use up enough word smithing to fill twice that.

Agreed, the current text limit of 256 characters is much too short for any real descriptive writing. Often it tends to be too short for writing a full conversational message even. Expanding the buffer limit is something that should be relatively easy to do programmingwise, and would remove a constant irritation of having to cut ones messages all the time. As an added bonus it would also keep Second Life from having to send as many e-mail messages when one wishes to leave an offline message. I'm fairly certain many roleplayers, descriptive writers and such that frequent Second Life can agree with this request, and there are no real downsides to it. Little things like these make all the difference with the user interface.

If actually expanding the buffer is not a possibility (but that is preferred), I would then suggest having the client cut the messages at entry point into 256 character blocks and sending them then one by one.

Anyone affected kindly /sign this request and show your support.

/Signed
Kanashimi Murakami

(To demonstrate the problem, this short post would have required 5 consequtive messages on Second Life)

humm, well increasing the lenght of the text we can write will be defenitly a good thing, as often especially when roleplaying I pass this limit and sometime it get quite boring to have to write thing you say or do in two or three post, so I will sign this and try to pass this message to other people as well while being there.
good luck
/sign

Agreed. increasing the text buffer helps alot. It will save whatever small headaches are being caused and help RPers alot making SL even more enjoyable fpr everyone

/signed
Mychasi Xingjian

I'd be happy if the input buffer would expend to two or three lines when I got to the end, instead of scrolling, so I could SEE what the hell I was doing. Maybe let me make the input buffer a regular dialog box, even, so I could focus on it or off it without having to hide it to use key commands.

Hehe, becouse I can. ^^

/signed

ragarth Doolittle

Agreed

/Signed
Serandite Graff

I wholly agree as well. You can add me to the petition. I'm new but one of the very first things I checked was the word buffer limit. Imagine my surprise when I find it maybe half the size of Furcadia. I thought it was small. Sheeesh. Hopefully they will rememdy that quickly.

This has now made it to feature suggestions:
http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=963

Hello there again, just jumping here for a moment to notify those who read the thread that theres a votable proposal made now at http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=963
So go ahead and head over there to put in your votes if you feel this is important :)

- Kanashimi Murakami

This makes things less a chat, and more of a set of monologues. In many cases I have seen people be too wordy.

On the other hand, if you are GM'ing a roleplay, you might want to be able to spit a large chunk of explication out.

In some ways it'd be nice if you could set it for the circumstances.

That's a lot more work, though.

I'd suggest a work around is to go for one or two sentences at a time, and indicate more to come by ending the lines with "..."

Absolutely. 1024 characters would be fantastic. That 256 char limit is a pain in da patootie.

256 is just way way too short. If someone is too wordy then tell them to not be so wordy, you shouldn't enforce your own personal character limit on other people. :(

If I'm sitting around trying to tell my friends something that happened in my day, even a "short" block can cut into the end of my character limit. I also like to roleplay. I'm on another game that allows unlimited (though it doesn't display what you're typing while you're typing it after a certain point) and there's really not all that big a problem with big monologues in OOC areas.

I'd love to see this increase, and also one in the IMs.

I wholeheartedly agree. I loathe the limit and hit it quite often when I am teaching classes or mentoring, because i like to include at least a whole CONCEPT in a sentence if the longer descriptiong ensures my exact meanings are maintained. (just look at that one sentence as example.)

But as I am always a devils advocate when it comes to feature requests I can give a minor reasoning for why the limit exists to begin with.

Channel messages like all things in SL are managed by an event queue system. These event queues get processed once per server 'frame' or 'pulse'. If certain events end up taking unusually long to process the way the server maintains its by throttling those events. In most cases this means just not completely all queued requests and letting them wait till the next frame to perform.

With all messages having set length limits this can allow for more intelligent evaluation of how many events (messages) can be processed within a given time frame, letting the others wait till the next frame for delivery. If all messages had a larger max size that isnt as close to what the average length is, this reduces the servers ability to make guesses at how much processing time will be required to process the queue.

I've worked on servers in the past using this method of queue logistics.

Reasons aside i never thought it was a valid reason to limit the message length as you can easily determine size as they are initially recieved and store this size as a header to the message and have the event queue for chat throttle itself after a set ammount of processing rather than making preemptive guesses.

I'm still all for message max lengths being drastically increased.

It's been over 5 months now, and several Zillion of updates. Time for a reminder for this proposal (http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=963), and just a post to voice my approval of this suggestion.