Limit Length of Highscore comments

Hey all,

I had a problem with a few people getting carried away with their comments when they posted highscores. They would type huge strings of nonsense or the same letter over and over until it caused page alignment problems (not to mention eating up database resources).

This is becuase the comment field in the database is a "TEXT" field and as such it can be up to 65,535 (2^16 -1) characters.

The "VARCHAR" field type has a max length of 255, and you can specify your own max length. Using the Admin CP in Vbulletin you can execute an SQL query directly from the CP to modify your comment field. Here's How:

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Click on "Maintenance" in the menu, then click "Execute SQL Query".

Once the Query box is up, copy and paste the following in the Manual Query Box:


ALTER TABLE `games_scores` CHANGE `comment` `comment` VARCHAR( 50 ) NOT NULL


You can edit the number to suit your own needs. Once you hit "continue", it will ask you to confirm. Hit continue again and it will change the "COMMENT" field to a VARCHAR type of the length you specify.

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Be advised, when you do this, any comments longer than the length you set will be truncated at the limit length.... but they will still be there. After that, the users can type whatever`they want, but the database will only store the first 50 (or whatever you set) characters.

I can't see this causing any problems during a future uninstall or upgrade since the table and field names remain the same. Maybe this could be integrated into the arcade CP at some point to allow for setting custom values.

Its nothing special, but it was the easiest way for me to alter the table and set a limit on the comment field in the game_scores table.