Effective immediately, messages posted on the message board layout pages will be limited to 4096 characters. This will greatly reduce the amount of spam (i.e. unwanted messages) that is getting posted. From our research, we've found that more than 99.99% of messages that are over 4096 characters are spam.
Spam takes away from your visitors' experience on your message boards and makes pages slower to load. It's also a burden on moderators to continually have to remove the posts. We've had many requests to help customers find ways to fight spam and felt this was the best option. Note that if a visitor does try to submit a message that's over the maximum allowed, they will see a notice to shorten their message.
Any old posts that are over 4096 characters are also going to be removed over the next few weeks in batches. We apologize if this affects any legitimate messages. Since over 99.99% of messages are spam, it was decided that the benefits outweighed the unfortunate loss of a small number of legitimate messages. There are hundreds of thousands of messages that are going to be deleted.
If you are aware of longer messages in your discussion boards you would like to keep, we encourage you to copy and paste them else where and/or repost them in parts.