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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

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Meta Post length limit for Code Reviews questions and 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 ...

posted 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Karl Knechtel‭ · 2026-07-29T02:14:50Z (about 2 months ago)
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.