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Post length limit for Code Reviews questions and answers
How long should a Code Reviews question be?
Currently the post length limit is 30,000 for all Codidact posts. If that were configurable per category, would you want to allow Code Reviews questions longer than this? What about answers, that might quote significant portions of the code from the question, and also include example changes to that code?
I ask because Post body too long but not too long? was raised following attempting to post a Code Reviews question of length just over 29,000, showing that there is at least one real example approaching the current limit.
2 answers
For what it's worth, I agree on the other meta Q&A that the bug is a bug; the limit should count Markdown characters rather than rendered HTML, since that's what the user can actually directly interact with. The worst cases for this shouldn't blow the rendered HTML up to sizes that are problematic in 2026, anyway. (Trying to maximize this might make a good question for the Puzzles incubator!)
I don't want to focus too much on volunteer effort (some might perceive that this is the seed of a culture of resentment), but I agree with Olin Lathrop that an overly-long question is unlikely to be properly focused in a way that allows for useful feedback. Even for a Code Review section, where questions and answers are unlikely to be directly searchable and applicable for others (still a good learning resource for others, but not in a targeted way), the underlying problem really does need to be scoped down to something reasonable. It's normal for reviewed code to have multiple possible improvements, so that doesn't make them closable as what we currently call "too generic". However, I do think that the code under discussion should implement only a single feature (it might be a complete project that does a single, well-defined thing; or it might be an extract from something larger).
Of course, even on Code Review a question is more than just a code dump. Sometimes multiple code blocks will be necessary. But in these cases, the second code block should really not be a clone of the original code with a minor modification or anything like that; it should be a few lines to highlight an alternative, for example. And while there should be some framing text
Putting all of that together, it's really hard for me to imagine that more than 30,000 characters would ever really be necessary for a properly-scoped, constructive Code Review question. Right off the top, it's clear to me that the proposed question that ran into the bug could be shorter. The screenshot shows the code starting off with a large block comment, but the information there is almost entirely redundant in our format and should be removed. "OVERVIEW OF PROGRAM" adds nothing; the authorship is already established by the format; and so on.
30,000 characters is probably around 1000 lines. That's already too much to ask volunteers on the internet to look thru.
If you're bumping into the limit, the problem is that your post is too long, not that the limit is too short.
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