Pages can only handle so many aliases

I'm pretty sure it is cut off after a set number of characters but the alias field only allows so many aliases to be saved, it lets me add them but on save it cuts them off.

We do have a limit on aliases based on characters. I can see about increasing it (how large a list do you forsee?)

@mrpibb: honestly since only mods and staff can add or delete them why have a limit at all? can you change the database field to a blob? I'm guessing you are using a varchar with a deliminator between aliases and exploding them? switching from a varchar to blob shouldn't interfere with that. I dunno I couldn't even guess on a good limit, if I say too low and six months down the line we hit the wall how easy will it be to get it changed? you guys won't be around nearly as much I'm guessing.

We'll be around :)

I'd prefer not to use a blob, that can cause problems in the future and validation is harder with that. I'll bump up the limits in the next 2-3 days, something like 2-3k characters. The upgrade is fast and painless.

I was going to say that I had a problem because I couldn't add aliases--the fields are locked--but I see above that you say that only mods and staff can add/delete aliases.

Why is this? I know sometimes people went nuts adding too many aliases, but it would be nice to be able to add them ourselves.

@owie: abuse, plain and simple, few bad apples ruin things for everyone sometimes. Part of it might be to make sure certain pages always have the same aliases for search rankings though.

So if we have (legitimate) aliases that should be added to some characters, we should PM a mod about it or something?

@owie: there is a thread for it in Editing & Tools :)

Did this ever happen? it seems like the limit has actually lowered in the past four days as many popular pages with lots of aliases have had aliases automatically removed without editing cause of the limit and for ones that were unaffected by the auto cut-off aliases are being removed on save.

hmmm, we haven't done a db change. I'll look into it today. Is this on a specific object or all objects?

@mrpibb: not sure, I'm seeing it on character pages but characters are usually the only pages with lots of aliases, I'll try a couple other page types.

@mrpibb: the limit is 247 characters now, example (let me know when you are done with the example so I can change it back :P).

thanks. I see the issue and we'll probably do a fix early next week to increase the amount of aliases.

@mrpibb: sounds good