Character counter and comments.

[Astute]

It's been suggested before, but I'll go ahead and suggest it again. I'm tired of bumping my head on the 1000 character ceiling when writing comments. I have to manually pull up a website to count the characters, edit it down to less than 1000, and then repaste the whole thing back into Steam.

It'd be really nice if there was a character counter next to the submit button that updates as I type. If I go over, turn the counter red, warning me that I've gone over my limit. The community, myself included, would really appreciate it.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Some languages count 2 for every 1 character entered. We all know how bad the spellcheck was on the forums for other languages underlining all their text as if it were incorrect. Not sure Valve wants to add a counter and have some users complain they don't get the same amount in their language.

[Astute]

The counter itself only displays how many characters you have entered. It does not enforce the 1000 character limit that is already in place. It is purely informational.

If some languages counted 2 for every 1 character entered, as you say, they would still hit the 1000 character ceiling regardless. If what you describe was the case, adding a counter would not change that ceiling, nor would it change certain languages hitting the cap earlier. This would be an entirely different problem, not a reason to not display the information.

If that were truely a problem, Valve knows what language you are writing in. They could set individual limits for each language. Even moreso, Steam likely uses UTF-16(65,536 possible characters) or UTF-32(4.3 million possible characters) unicode, which means each English(26 possible characters) character I am writing at this very moment uses the same amount of space as a Chinese(50,000 possible characters) character. Regardless of whether or not I'm correct in this assumption, that is a server space or packet size issue, and it would not affect the counter.

I'm making assumptions about how their backend works, so they may have a different approach. The fact that I can simply cut and paste any text out of steam into a barebones website character counter(regardless of language) and get a concrete number begs the question, why is this not simply added to Steam? Also, character counting is purely client-side, and would require no server communication to process. The only overhead rests on the client.

This suggestion is merely a quality of life improvement.

[Allonzow.]

Good

[Connie]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.