Very long characters in post causes 403 Error

[simonmaltby]

Hi,

Started building a new Forum based on SMF and have to say how pleased I am with the software.... so a big thank you.

I have two questions / issues which I would welcome some assistance with.

FIRST ISSUE:
I have a need / want to post very long character text in some threads.  For example I was pasting in a 20,000 word, 120,000 character newsletter into a post today and when clicking on post or save (when modifying) got a server error 403.  If I shorten it to about 20,000 charaters it posts fine.

The first thing I did was locate the maximum post characters in Admin and set it to 500,000 and then 0 = any then I tried 200,000.  What ever I set this value to seems to make no difference.

Any help on this would be apprechiated.

SECOND - A QUESTION
Can i force a new registraton to enter a date of birth?  I can see that I can force them to say they are over a set age, but can't seem to find how to force them to enter a full date of birth.  Is this possible without adding something manually into the code?

Thanks for reading this and hope you can offer some help.

Regards
Simon

[Kindred]

A 403 would probably be something to ask your host about.

As for the birthdate...   There may be a mod... Otherwise you will have to do some manual edits.

[Colin]

I have a slight hunch that mod security might be the culprit for the first issue. Ask your host if that is enabled. If it is, ask them to disable it.

[simonmaltby]

I have a slight hunch that mod security might be the culprit for the first issue. Ask your host if that is enabled. If it is, ask them to disable it.

Thanks for the reply Colin.

Logic tells me that it can't be mod security because everything else seems to function properly.
I have asked my web hosts if it is enabled and if it is I will try again with it disabled.

I was just looking again at the posts I managed to get saved by splitting the 120,000 charaters into 3 seperate posts.  One is 30,000 characters, the next 70,000 and the final one 20,000
so its all a bit odd.  I will try mod security and also look through the pasted text for any odd characters or a sequence that could be interpreted as html etc.... although how i managed to post it split up goes against this theory.

[Colin]

Good point Simon. The fact that splitting it gets it through would make it seem less likely a mod_security issue.