Kate writes:

"Eight posts a day maximum 150-175 lines or 1200 words each will be
accepted. Posts will be truncated accordingly."

She adds:

"the limit is nearly ten thousand words"

Kate -- I assume you're using an average of 7 words to a line, and that
seems reasonable. For example the thirty words above take 5 lines (I assume
Databack does not count a space between lines.) That's only 6 words a line,
but
the occurrence of two two-word lines in five lines is unusual.

If one did have the alleged maximum 175 lines in a posting, at 7 words per
line that would be a maximum number of words of 1,250 -- close enough to
1,200. And eight postings of the maximum would be 10,000 words.

And I agree that, while reprinting the single previous posting one is
responding to (or at least some pertinent excerpts) is usually a good idea,
reprinting much more than that is usually unnecessary and cluttering.

However, I feel fairly sure there have been single postings of far more
than 1,200 words in recent months. The grounds for my feeling semi-sure are a
semi-reliable   recollection that one day, upon seeing a very long posting by
a lister, I copied it, pasted it in a blank Word doc, and clicked 'Word
Count'. It was a multiple of 1,200. So I then posted a message that was also a
multiple of 1,200 -- and all of it went through.

I'm not complaining about this. Except for the unthinking reprinting of
almost an entire thread,   I don't find much abuse of the alleged
length-restriction. (If Kirby were still with us, given his admitted
assignment to
himself to test the limits of tolerance of any forum he's on, I imagine he'd
try
posting his PhD thesis.)

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