WCS - big MOTD bugs

[NewB]

As reported earlier on the old km forum, there is some problem with using big motds.

When they reach a certain size, some random garbage appears after the last line of the motd.

I thought I'd try something.. I added #c255# to black out the garbage characters.. and instead, it seemed to clear it.

Some time later, I decided to add a couple lines.  I guess that pushed it over the edge.  The MOTD looked fine.  No garbage characters appended to it.  But as soon as I tried to login, wcs would crash.. tried it about 5 times and the same.  then I shortened the MOTD by a few lines and it was back to normal.  No garbage and login worked ok.

[KM]

I know there are some issues with extremely long MOTD's, although to be perfectly honest i dont know why - WCS should have 20k of memory reserved simply for the task of storing the MOTD, so i dont know why the memory problems are occouring - no doubt i'll spot it sooner or later while i'm working on something completely unrelated.

Until then i was thinking of perhaps simply limiting the MOTD to something smaller, but I'm not sure that some hosts would like it so for now i'm going for the "if its too long it'll crash, if it doesn't crash you're fine" method of keeping peoples MOTD's short enough

[NewB]

It is nothing major.. and the solution is simple.

Just limit the MOTD to about 2k characters.

I only mentioned it because of the new 'tricks' i discovered, that adding #c255# to the end of the MOTD= line in the config can cause any garbage characters not to print.

Second, that this can't be relied on to add lots more text. since I sadly discovered that the channel becomes uncontrollable due to the inability to login with out crashing the room.

I had 13-15 users in the room when I discovered the latter problem..  Most were AFK, just parked to keep in contact and share their files..   it been almost 24 hours and only about half have found there way back. :\  

So this is just a heads up.. sharing what i learned the hard way, for others to watch the MOTD size and not go too much over 2k for now.

So keep up the good work KM.. debugging I am told takes 80% of the time, compared to 20% for the initial writing of code.  I think 90-10 is more realistic based on the projects I have worked with.

[DJ]

I limited the one in WCS, but it u set the MOTD in 3.53 u can make it a bit longer and it will allow it.  Thats what I do and it works fine cause it is not in WCS config file.  Hope this helps some of you.

[Anonymous]

I limited the one in WCS, but it u set the MOTD in 3.53 u can make it a bit longer and it will allow it.  Thats what I do and it works fine cause it is not in WCS config file.  Hope this helps some of you.

AFAIK, setting the MOTD with an online /setmotd command is limited to 341 characters..  In the config file, you can set an MOTD much larger  and it is these huge multi-line MOTDs that is at issue, not the mini-motds that are manually set online.  Although, KM says theoretically MOTD can be 10-15,000 characters, I find problems develop if it is much over 2300 characters.  But that is a good limit for me.. It fills the screen with very little scroll off.