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I'll elaborate before pointing at it in the thread.
Because we have a risk of database imploding if someone saves giant text at once, there exists a warning banner in the editor if the current page version is over 500000K HTML-characters long within <div id="main-article"> (See investigation here
), which is a sign (the banner doesn't actually ask that) for users to add it to Overly Long Pages and discuss. By approximation, we've agreed that if the article is about 150000 text characters long in the editor, it should be broken up into subpages.
So the idea is
- Add the character counter to the editor. It was actually a feature before, but was removed for unclear reasons.
- Display a warning if the article is long enough before saving.
- Add the HTML character counter to the editor. It would require some math how much each wiki markup translates into HTML elements.
- Scan the articles database once for page size, then automate adding new edits to Overly Long Pages or a new tool page if saved text is long enough.
My impression that a few years ago the then-developers said they didn't want to show this information, but I think it was in a now-deleted thread in the mod forum.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Basically.
It'd be useful to have two, the characters counter and the estimated HTML weight (with visual editor it may be easier to estimate).
If HTML size is approaching 500'000 (which in wiki format could be anywhere from 80'000 up to 500'000 symbols), then it should display a similar warning to the "Warning: This article is too long. It needs to be broken into multiple pages." banner.
Edited by Amonimus TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
I mean, see the pinned post of this thread. I'm not sure which admin and when added those extra notes, but it's been generally believed that saving a page too large, if not kill the DB, then at least would cause it to misbehave when saving too much data at once. You may have to ask seniors if they know something about it, people decided not to experiment further. Normally websites would validate the input client-side, length included, before trying to process it.
So i just asked management, the DB wont implode regardless of the size of the page anymore but it will negatively impact SEO as well as user experience by taking extra long to save or load pages. It was suggested we should try to lower the threshold for page size from 500k to be more around 300k bytes if thats doable, but im not sure how many pages that would effect or how much work it would be?
Edited by kory Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs
To answer that it would require checking by DB how many articles are like that.
Automating Overly Long Pages is another related thing that could be useful.
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
As discussed here
, it'd be useful to have a line in the wiki editor that tells how long the page is, in HTML bytes, before the red Too-Long warning appears. Apparently a simplified version of it was in the old version of the site but was removed at some point.
Edited by Amonimus