I'm currently working on a tutorial for fitting sprite graphics into tweetcarts (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=44375), but I've run into a problem. I have a lot of text to upload, but the BBS seems to be putting arbitrary limits on how much I can fit into a post, and it's very frustrating.

I'm already stretching the tutorial into multiple posts because for some reason it won't let me add any more text to the intial post, but now it won't even let me upload a reasonably-sized bit of code into a post by itself. I put a similarly-sized chunk of code into the previous post, but in the next one I can only post about 60% of that amount. Any more and the little loading animation just endlessly loops and nothing gets uploaded. If anyone can help me out with this, I'd really appreciate it.

Hmmm... I've never experienced this myself, but then again, I haven't anything "wordy" on the BBS in a while.

Perhaps @zep (or maybe @Felice) might have an idea of what might be limiting your efforts (or tips to avoid issues)?

Either way, hope we can get to see the rest of your great tutorial! 🤓👍

Hi @JadeLombax

I've just pushed a change to the server that allows for larger posts (was previously 64k), and tested it with the text of Alice in Wonderland (150k). Hopefully that was the problem, but otherwise feel free to mail me the text (hey at lexaloffle dot com) so that I can try and reproduce it. Apologies for the trouble -- and I'm looking forward to reading the tutorial! (I'm working on something similar for 4-colour rle with spans of 2 pixels or more)

p.s. you can also test with unlisted posts to make sure it's going to show up as expected:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/edit.php?new_post=1&unlisted=1

Thanks for responding,

After trying to post some more, it seems the problem isn't file size, as my current draft is only around 11,700 chars, definitely not hitting the 64KB limit. At least to some degree, though, the problems seem related to posting code snippets. For instance, I tried to upload a large portion of text with two single-line formatted code snippets, and it wouldn't work, but after removing the formatting so that the code was just another line of text, it worked fine.

I'm not sure if it's just the formatting, though, because then I tried to upload the portion with the two encoders in fomatted code, and that didn't work, but it still wouldn't work when I removed the formatting. I'm pretty puzzled, but I've gone ahead and emailed you a copy of the text.

Hey, so it looks like the email isn't coming through either! (assuming you sent it from the same address as your BBS account). Could I ask you to try again and also cc: it to picopicocafe at gmail dot com? You might need to zip it and then change the extension from .zip to something else in case there is a magic string in there that is also getting picked up by a mail server somewhere (?)

It's possible there is something in the text that is triggering a security rule while posting. lexaloffle.com is behind Cloudflare's traffic filter to prevent a lot of regular attacks & spammers -- but running at a very permissive level, so it hasn't been an issue for a while.

I couldn't find the culprit in recent event logs, but as a test I've temporarily disabled Cloudflare's firewall to see if that makes a difference.

Wow, the issue must be the firewall because I tried the whole thing in one post, and it worked immediately. I've never done any hacking, so I don't know what elements of the code could be triggering an alert, but I resent you the email, along with the text in a .zep file. ;)