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Since when are we limited in the length of our answers?
Never once have I been given the prompt to remove text from an answer, but that happened a minute ago.
I admit to being long winded at times, but have always typed my answers freely without any indication that my answers were too long. Just now, I was given the prompt to 'remove irrelevant information' without telling me HOW MUCH I had gone over. This meant that I had to try removing stuff, check for length (still too long), try removing more stuff again ... check for length again ... still too long ... but I don't know how much more stuff to remove, so I keep taking stuff off ... but can't there be a little thing that says how far we've gone over so we know HOW MUCH TO REMOVE !?!??!
Please?
Thanks for the suggestions, Pareidolon. They would be perfect except that emails are even more limited in how long they can be, and a lot of people don't allow emails.
Why on Earth would YA A) Change the parameters in which we can answer questions, and B) Change it without letting us know? I know this isn't rocket science, and we're not curing cancer or anything here ... but for someone as prolific as I can be, it's like flying in the dark and will definitely curtail my contribution in here. At the VERY least, we should at least be told how many characters we have - like right now, I'm watching the countdown as I type, so why don't they do that with everything, instead of reserving it for editing, or emails? I really don't understand what possible reasoning can be behind this ...
Thanks to blackocean, too, for the empathy!!
The editing is probably the way to go, but if you think the petition would actually produce a favorable result, I'll be happy to sign!! Having never begun a petition campaign before, I have no idea how to begin one ... do you?
4 Answers
- 1 decade agoFavorite Answer
It's been happening a little while now, and it made me verrrry angry. Especially when dealing with Questions of a factual nature, where you have to explain a lot, include a lot of data, or quotes. I noticed they didn't include any guide to let you know how much to cut, I think Yahoo comments on their articles will let you know, but not YA. It's the same company, should have the same technology, what gives??
I did NOT know you could add more through edits, more beyond the text limit I mean. That's very useful.
It made me so angry, it gave me experience as an editor, haha. I had to cut sentences that were somewhat unnecessary, and rephrase a lot to be shorter. After awhile, I felt I had cut all that I could cut and still hold to the integrity of the post. After making the post look like crap(deleting proper spaces, and resorting to "Caveman phrasing" with incomplete sentences), I finally got under the limit. That was extremely frustrating, and I wound up saving my post in a document and editing it there, instead. So I could go back to the original for whatever reason, if I had to.
I think it happened to me over a month ago, not sure how long exactly.
Perhaps we need to petition them for an indicator telling us how far to go...it would help us when making editing decisions, you know?
- Pareidolon 6,oLv 71 decade ago
Well I recently estimated, by experiment, that you can give an answer of 5000 characters in length to start, and an additional 5000 characters can be placed when editing that answer. However Yahoo won't give us an estimate, and I hear they have recently decreased the maximum length of answers (also without saying anything) and that this sometimes further decreased by various glitches.
You could try posting some and then editing the rest in. You could also try posting some and emailing the rest to the asker, or as others have suggested, making a secondary account to post the rest.
- 1 decade ago
obama has put a freeze on long winded answers that are written on a computer....says we should be out working instead of typing answers to questions...
