Question

How many words are we allowed in our log entry?

Answer 1

There's no word limit that I know of, but there used to be a character limit of about 4000 I think. I'm unsure if that's still the case now that Groundspeak have changed the log style, but I'd imagine so.

Answer 2

The 4000 character log limit and the word count algoritm sets the limit

Before the new pgc word count algoritm the max was 2000 words. on letter follow by one word. But i guess that would not be a meaningful log
With the new algorithm that will probably don't work and a guess it the average word length has to be two or three letter and a space. That is 1333 or 1000 words so the max is somewhere in that region.

But that is in a language with latin letters. If you write in Chinese each Unicode character  is counted as one in length. I i am not mistaken there is many words that only have one ideograms so te old answer with 2000 words is probibly correct.  And i guess that som readable log could be written like that.

Comments

There are also logtexts that are over 7000 characters long. It might be an older limit though.

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It that the log length in bytes or in different characters displayed when interpreted?
My post above is Google translates to chinese, original text and duplicated until the log wall full
                           log lenght  file size bytes
original english           728           728
original Chinese         230           596
max      Chinese       4000        10347

Groundspeek counts 1-3 byte UTF-8 as 1 length and 4 bytes as 2 length som max log length in bytes is 12000

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That's in UTF8 characters as far as I know. I will ask a database server to find a few long logs for us.

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Here are a few quite long logs:
+-----------+------+
| log_id    | l    |
+-----------+------+
| 303058392 | 9898 |
| 305307808 | 9875 |
| 307975826 | 9873 |
| 302535915 | 9847 |
| 309178857 | 9846 |
| 303057955 | 9757 |
| 304084596 | 9731 |
| 308196891 | 9724 |
| 308196546 | 9715 |
| 303498301 | 9711 |
+-----------+------+
https://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LID=<log_id>

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All logs are from the same user and they are shown as a short text on the web followed by white space
Tried to download the top on in gsak but the result was a 4000 char log but that is probably a gsak limitation.

The data after the normal text is in hex the pattern 3F3F3F20 repeating
3F3F and 3F20 is chinese character in UTF-16 but  3F3F3F20 i not.
And it is not valid UTF-8 chars.
It is ???space in pure ascii.
But that is assuming that the value is not converted along the way and that i get the right value. GSAK in not the best program handling UTF-8
if i just copies the text from firefox i get the repeating pattern 20E2808C so i have no real idea what the values should be

The users longest log in the pgc stat is 988 words but i can only see 16 on gc.com and alot on not visible chars. I think the word count algoritm is not appropriera in the case

It is not only old logs that are like their their last logyesterday  572972119 is also 400 chars i gsak


My guess is that the log uses some Unicode chars that gc.com converts for some reason.
A strange configured browser with incorrect char encoding.
Or some browser plugin creates non standard code for smiles etc.
It might also be a "clever" way to create long logs for stats that don't are long on the cache page