Background
This feature request is strongly related to Formatting should not count towards the character limit on comments, but the underlying intentions – as well as the specific request – are different.
The bug report Nitpick: Comment character length limit is less than 600 when you include a URL longer than 24 characters only addresses automatically generated links, not links using Markdown syntax.
Motivation
The character limits are in place to prevent users from posting comments that are either too short or too long. But the length of a comment, for most practical purposes, depends on the amount of text that's being displayed.
As it is, the following comments are too long:
This is a comment linking to a lot of meta posts, help pages, Stack Overflow searches and Google queries. Some of the URLs are rather long.
URLs don't have to be long to exceed the character limit on comments if the title attribute is used.
To add insult to injury, the following comments are valid:
This is a huge wall of text, possibly from a user rambling about something he should have either said in an answer of his own or kept quiet altogether. Since there are so many words – and you can't use paragraphs in comments – it separates 1) different points 2) in several 3) sequentially numbered 4) but equally obnoxious 5) list items. By now, you probably have lost interest and stopped reading, or you're silently hoping for the audio version narrated by Jeremy Irons, the soothing voice of Scar from The Lion King. Lion King? Hyenas? Wasn't there a song? Must stay focused and finish reading...
The 600 character maximum is too restrictive when posting links (let alone links with title attributes).
@Shog9 suggested in this answer to simply increase that maximum, but the current maximum already allows almost unbearable walls of text.
Also, the link syntax might only one of the many ways to circumvent the 15 character minimum, but it's probably the most widely known. Users should at least learn proper Unicode to be able to do that!
Request / TL;DR
In comments, when posting links using the [text](URL)
or [text](URL "title")
syntax, don't make the URL
and title
count towards the existing character limits (both maximum and minimum).
To prevent potential abuse of this feature, limit the overall count of characters to 1500.
Title
to not count