I am now in possession of the most accurate word counting machine on BZP.

You may ask, where's the culture?

Well, here's the story.

Back in the day, I could post potentially rule-breaking comedy chapters directly from BZP into Microsoft Word. It worked fine for a while, and I could always tell whether a chapter was 300 words or not.

But then one day Word started freezing when I tried to post the comedy chapters in. I tried to paste, but the paste just wouldn't!

And so to circumvent this problem, I pasted stuff intio WordPad, and then into Word from there. It seemed like it was working fine, until good old Schizo pointed out that my word counting was totally off.

Upon further investigation, WordPad was cutting out a lot of the text that it took in, possibly due to the presence of emotes -- but even just text confused it.

But the solution presented itself -- after cycling through all of my favorite programs, I finally found one that could get the job done: Microsoft PowerPoint.

Not only can it receive text in an instant, but it also eliminates any and all emotes that are present in a block of text. Thus, I can paste that block into Word and find the actual number of words in a chapter (as I believe that emoticons are indeed counted as words when you paste straight into Word ).

So beware, spammers abroad; your emote-limit pushing comedies are no longer safe!

Onuki, over and out