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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

why would facebook do this? Is it anything more than negligence?

That's pretty much it. They already fail to provide cross-browser compatibility for their website (Opera has long had problems with it), so this is just another way of thumbing their nose at open standards.

what are the consequences besides some facebook messages ending up truncated? Do excessive messages of this type choke up mailservers or anything else of the sort?

From TFA:

as spammers make the same mistake rather often - I've seen line length checks for Quoted-Printable implemented in antispam software.

So I'm guessing quite a few emails from Facebook are getting sent to people's spam folders.

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> so this is just another way of thumbing their nose at open standards.

It's likely much less "thumbing their nose at open standards" as it is just a matter of making sure their software works for the vast majority of their users.

I know that's how I develop software, anyways -- if there's a quirk in a browser used by a very small percentage of users that's not entirely simple to fix, I don't. It's just a matter of priorities: create new features and upgrade existing ones for 99% of your users or fix features for 1% of users. Depending on the feature, you make a rational decision.

Facebook has 200 million users. If they don't fix a feature for 1% of their users, that's affecting 2 million people. I'd say that's pretty significant. When you consider that this bug probably affects a lot more than 1% of the users, you're looking at tens of millions of affected users.

Moreover, I seriously doubt that a company like Facebook has any manpower issues when it comes to fixing bugs on their site.

I've heard this argument - the "if a large company ignores a small percentage then they're still doing awful things" - to justify a hell of a lot of griping. If Facebook was doing this willfully then I'd agree with you, but as it is they're an enormous company dealing with possibly the most complex consumer site (interface-wise) out there, and I'd be willing to bet they've got a few dozen priorities that are messing up for more than a percentage point, and that all those priorities are really tricky problems.

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