Moodle in English

I currently have a faculty member who is having students keep journals on their summer internships. They're using the "Journal" activity, and this week they started hitting a wall; Journal refused to accept any more text after about 9000 words (55,000 characters, or about 68kb in size as a text file).

Knowing that Journal is being phased out in favor of Online Text Assignment in Moodle 2.0, I decided to see how well online assignment did with these long journal entries. It did slightly better, reaching 11545 words (64,000 characters, or 64kb in size as a text file).

Unfortunately both Online Text Assignment and Journal fail quietly when they reach their limits, at least in Firefox 3, not telling students that they've reached the limits of the assignment. This has given rise to confusion as half of my example class has reached this limit at about the same time. I haven't been able to find any references to a hard size limit for Online Assignment (or Journal for that matter), but clearly there is one.

So my question is ... what is this limit a function of? The web browser? Moodle itself?

In either case, I think it would be useful to add something about this limitation to the documentation (http://docs.moodle.org/en/Online_text_assignment) so that folks are aware of possible walls.

Our immediate solution to this problem is to create multiple journals/online assignments or to suggest that students write their entries in a word processor and upload them instead.

User blogs, if they could be limited to a course, would solve this problem nicely (as we'd have a bunch of smaller entries, rather than one huge one) but my understanding is that blogs in Moodle don't work this way.