Comment character limit

Question

So, comments are limited to a certain number of characters (seems to be 600, or thereabouts; I'll say 600 for the purpose of this post). However, I sometimes link to other posts/sites in a comment, like so:

[here's my link](http://somedomain.com/this/url/is/very/long/blah/blah/blah)

and there are times where this URL takes up a many of the 600 characters I'm given to use.

Is there any way to way to ignore formatting characters in comments so that they're not considered part of the 600 allowed characters? Is this limited to just JLU comments, or should this go higher up to stackexchange admins?

Answer 1

All StackExchange sites have a 600 (or fewer) character limit. Somebody has already asked about not counting URLs towards the character limit, but the answer was the database has to store comments in their markdown form, and the physical limit in the database is currently 600 characters.

A similar proposal was shot down for ignoring formatting characters (like the bold and italic markers) for the same reason.

Answer 2

Solution 1: use Answers, not Comments. If you are running into the character limit, chances are you should be posting as an answer.

Solution 2: URL shorteners.

Answer 3

I don't know if this is appreciated, but when I want to comment beyond the limit, I make consecutive comments.

Answer 4

I think the character limit is good at 600 precisely because it doesn't exclude links. Personally, I find myself running into and beyond the limit very few times, but you can always post two consecutive comments.

When I am reading through old posts, the most tiresome is reading long comments, because they are in a small font size, are hard to read, but sometimes contain interesting information. If comments were allowed to be even longer, I think each question page would risk becoming very cluttered.