-10

Is there is already such restriction? If no, why not restrict questions to some max length to avoid too long questions?

Such questions are usually difficult to read and too vague.

  • 2
    imo there is no correlation between length of question and quality of question. Short questions can be vague and difficult to read. Often long and highly researched questions with equally long answers provide this site with some of the highest quality material and make a fantastic resource. – McNab Jun 19 '13 at 11:15
8

Is there is already such restriction?

Yes there is already a limit of character length on posts. The maximum length of any post (either question or answer) is 30,000 in Stack Overflow.

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10

Some questions need to be long in order to fully explain the issue. It is hard to imagine a hard limit that would work for all Stack Exchange sites (or even within a site).

For example - if a question on Stack Overflow requires a code listing, an explanation of what it does, what the OP tried and hasn't worked, sample inputs, outputs and stack traces?

If a question is difficult to read and is too vague - suggest an edit, comment. Do something about it.

  • Looks like there is such limit though, 30,000 characters. :) – Shadow The Curly Braced Wizard Jun 19 '13 at 11:56
  • 1
    @ShaWizDowArd - Yeah. I forgot about that. Enforced by the codebase. It is a soft limit, so on other Stack Exchanges we can change it to be more suitable. – Oded Jun 19 '13 at 11:57
  • @ShaWizDowArd - The question now is, does the OP think that 30k characters is too long ;) – Oded Jun 19 '13 at 12:12
  • soft limit you mean in configuration? Nice! According to the score, don't think the OP will ask to lower the limit. :D – Shadow The Curly Braced Wizard Jun 19 '13 at 12:14
  • Because it is interesting, I found that there are actually about 950 posts on Stack Overflow that are over this soft-limit of 30,000 characters, with the biggest being this answer, which is currently 53,383 characters long. cc @ShadowWizard – Bob Oct 10 '15 at 12:26
  • @Bob interesting, Oded might tell how he bypassed the 30000 limit set in code. – Shadow The Curly Braced Wizard Oct 10 '15 at 12:32
  • Probably predate the soft limit. Or could be html expansion of markdown. @Sha – Oded Oct 11 '15 at 15:04

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