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Character limit for artist biography


Posted: 15 Jun 2024 14:59
psyburr
Posts: 1
Joined: 2020-08-23

I'm not sure if anyone has come across an artist biography that is excessively long or not, but recently I found one with 20k+ character, including odd line terminations that indicate this was not typed by someone but clearly stolen from another source. It was filled with unnecessary details about internet flame wars and a timeline marking exact dates that this, then that, then, and then, that only a superfan would care to know about.

The point I'm leading to is that I think there ought to be a character limit imposed upon artist biographies. This not only will keep them on topic, but also clear and concise enough for someone who is not a fan but just happened to pull the data in when scraping the artist via the API. I came across the real world problem myself when going through my own library data in an xml file, and at 20k+ characters in a single line my own desktop machine turned up to 11 to load the data. I can't imagine embedded devices/android/low-end having to attempt the same, which is more than likely where they will hang on users or just fall over from exhaustion and crash.

I believe imposing a character limit will address multiple things at once: the copying of unlicensed biographies and then publishing them here under a CC license; the biography from a superfan detailing every member of a bands childhood, love life, and life after leaving the band; making the database more accessible to low end devices because even though I include line breaks myself in this text field, if we are to treat this is a biography and pull the data, it will be received as a single line of text with HTML codes to indicate line breaks and other such non printable characters.
(i do not have a problem with how the data is delivered by the database, the issue i have is the content itself and could curtail other conflicts by implementing a limit in the text box for biographies.)

Thoughts? This is just a proposal for whoever may see it and wish to chime in.

Posted: 11 Jul 2024 13:27
zag
Posts: 242
Joined: 2020-07-14

Yep we should limit I think. The question is only to how much?


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