Also if I recall correctly, some browsers do not supply a proper buffer for the url, so in extreme cases it can kill the browser if too long of a url is created.
I remember one site that took up litterally 5 full lines of my IE Address bar. And that's with a bar going all the way across my screen, 800x600, and a 19inch screen.
It was just a mangled mess of data.
Also however, WAP phones have a much more restrictive url length. On a Nokia phone in an article I read on the topic, choked on a url string that was only around 100 chars, including the domain name in that count.
Also, urls do count in WAP deck size, and to stay down below that 1452 byte restriction (if I recall the number correctly), you need every bit of character space you can squeeze.
One last note is that recent reversions of the Ultimate Bulletin board only support around a 3-line long url. The "[url]" tag won't format it properly after that (not sure if they changed that in the latest versions).
If someone goes to the trouble of pasting a link to your site, the last thing you want is to keep people from visiting your site because your URL is too long.
Of course if you somehow manage to create a url that's greater than 66k bytes (which crashes quite a few sorta-semi-recent browsers), you have bigger problems than...well, you have problems.
