riscfl:
The out of the box limit is 8000 characters, which includes the text you write as well as the supporting HTML that is generated and stored in the Announcements.Description field in your database.
The original club starter kit had a really small limit for news articles (less than 8000 characters, but I don't remember exactly what it was). Unfortunately, it also doesn't do much error checking, so if you go over the limit the article is silently discarded.
riscfl:
1. Changing the database column from varchar(8000) to varchar(MAX)
I might be wrong, but I think that the maximum size of a varchar in MS SQL is 8000 chars, so the above statement doesn't seem to make sense.
riscfl:
2. Change Accouncements.vb under \App_Code\DAL\Generated to support the change in length you want where the dimension is declared.
Dim colvarDescription As TableSchema.TableColumn = New TableSchema.TableColumn(schema)
colvarDescription.ColumnName = "description"
colvarDescription.DataType = DbType.String
colvarDescription.MaxLength = xxxxxxx
colvarDescription.AutoIncrement = false
colvarDescription.IsNullable = true
colvarDescription.IsPrimaryKey = false
colvarDescription.IsForeignKey = false
colvarDescription.IsReadOnly = false
This is for CSK 2+, not the original CSK.
If you need more than varchar(MAX), which I think is 8000 characters, then you can switch to the database column type 'text', which is virtually unlimited.