Investigate messages getting broken up

[sethetter]

It sounds like certain carriers result in the messages received being broken up, even if the message is short. Let's figure out how to prevent that!

[imacrayon]

Here's what I got from Sprint:

Looks like they're consistently broken up into 153 character chunks. I'm not sure what happened with that message on Monday though.

[sethetter]

Sounds like sprint is a consistent problem! I've heard the same from Sarah Jane at KMUW.

[kentonh]

SMS messages are limited to 160 characters, and it looks like the carrier breaks up messages that are too big according to arbitrary guidelines of pagination or other information.

I'm not positive, but based on the archive the Monday message might have had some character returns in the message that confused the carriers more.

Limiting the messages to 150 characters and cleaning the string might be the best way to prevent breaking up the messages.
A testing system (a message creator can test a message by sending it to themselves) is a secondary (more complex) option.

[imacrayon]

I’ve got a plan to develop some kind of UI that will show where messages might break, something similar to this: http://chadselph.github.io/smssplit/

[sethetter]

I was looking into the Twilio logs and noticed that messages with a GSM encoding were sent in 1 segment, but the UCS2 ones (for the most recent message) were sent in 4 segments 😱 .

[sethetter]

Reading up on this more and it looks like there are few things that can trigger a message getting split into segments. One of them is length, the other is using non-GSM supported characters, and apparently the most common offenders are the fancy smart quotes that a lot of computers substitute in for regular quote marks!

I filed #103 as a result.