Posts with a Huge Number of Links - What's the Limit?

[donrocks]

Hello folks, there are some posts on my website with a ton of links in them, and I mean several hundred in a single post.

This has always been a dicey proposition (I've been with Invision since 2005) - in the past, once a post got beyond a certain size, or certain number of links (I never found out which it was), hitting "Save" produced something of a catastrophic result. Now that the old edits of posts are saved, this is no longer a significant risk.

But recently, I updated to the current version, and a similar problem has come up: I click to save the post, and it takes seemingly forever, eventually coming back with an error message saying, "This post can no longer be edited." However, the post does get saved, and I've never had it fail yet.

Does anyone know how many links IPS can handle in a single post without failure? Support has advised me to carve the posts up into smaller portions, but I'm not sure how small - I guess I could use a divide-and-conquer approach to see, but it would save some time if I had a good starting point.

For example: This and this would count as "two links." How many links can a single post handle?

Thanks!
Don

[bfarber]

There is no hard limit, and this is difficult to answer. If you link to 100 youtube videos, we will call out to a number of them in order to embed the videos, and how long that takes can depend upon factors outside the software's control.

[donrocks]

On 4/10/2019 at 8:48 AM, bfarber said:

There is no hard limit, and this is difficult to answer. If you link to 100 youtube videos, we will call out to a number of them in order to embed the videos, and how long that takes can depend upon factors outside the software's control.

Thanks, bfarber. I'm not talking about Youtube video, but links like this. I have a dining guide, and for each restaurant, I have a link to the thread, plus links to their website, Twitter, Instagram, and Google map - that's up to 5 links per restaurant, and there are many hundreds of restaurants (split into several posts). 

I'm wondering if it's the sheer number of links, or if the links take up a certain amount of storage, or a certain amount of time to resolve - I could fix these, but I'm not sure what needs changing.

This is an example of a small dining guide; in the Washington, DC area, the guides are at least an order of magnitude larger.

If anyone has experience with a problem like this (surely I'm not the only one?), I'd sure appreciate some advice, maybe a workaround.

[Nathan Explosion]

There is no limit on the number of links - and links are just text. This is just this:

<a href="https://invisioncommunity.com" rel="external">This</a>

Now....why could it fail?

Possible......when you submit a post, the links within it will get checked against the links listed in 'Link filtering' (if you have it set to anything other than 'Allow any links'.....and if you have a large number of allowed or disallowed links then it's potentially possible that your large number of links being parsed via the large list is taking a large amount of time to be performed.

There could be other reasons - and, personally speaking, I think the advice by support to 'carve things up' is bad advice as all it does is attempt to workaround a potential issue that could be fixed, if the issue was analysed further to determine the actual cause of the problem.

 

[donrocks]

On 4/23/2019 at 4:38 AM, Nathan Explosion said:

There is no limit on the number of links - and links are just text. This is just this:

<a href="https://invisioncommunity.com" rel="external">This</a>

Now....why could it fail?

Possible......when you submit a post, the links within it will get checked against the links listed in 'Link filtering' (if you have it set to anything other than 'Allow any links'.....and if you have a large number of allowed or disallowed links then it's potentially possible that your large number of links being parsed via the large list is taking a large amount of time to be performed.

There could be other reasons - and, personally speaking, I think the advice by support to 'carve things up' is bad advice as all it does is attempt to workaround a potential issue that could be fixed, if the issue was analysed further to determine the actual cause of the problem.

 

I could not agree with you more. "Carving the posts up" is a terrible workaround, and it provides absolutely no guidance as to how many links (or how long the parsing resolution) can be. Surely someone else besides me has this problem, no? Am I the only forum who indexes all their posts?

This is an awful situation, and it's becoming a very real pain in my rear end.

I've hit a situation where one of my posts - not even one of the biggest ones - simply cannot be updated, and I have no idea why. It takes forever, then gives me an error message, and the updated post doesn't "take."

(Thanks for your thoughtful response, btw!) 🙂

[Joel R]

1.  I invite you to submit a ticket in the Client Area where you can provide an example.  

2.  I wonder if it might be related due to the Twitter handle names that use the @mention symbol, which might be trying to assign to a user mention.  

3.  I think you have some fascinating examples of dining in San Francisco, and think you could really benefit from the power of Pages.