Time to do something that the Precipicers will be familar with. A wordcount!
For references,
This is the original MCF thread. There was also a sporum thread, it is older... but i'm not messing with that.
So, I actually went ahead and tallied the specific wordcounts of a sample set of pages, which gave me this
(page): (wordcount)
5: 2445
25: 8134
50:10013
75: 7407
100:22,756
137: 33,036
An interesting note: Page 137, the last completed page in the MCF, has a long enough word count to count as a novelette.
Averaging that gave me an average word count pet page of ~13965, which in turn gave me an average post count (since there is 20 posts per page) of 698. This is below my 750 guess I used during the last post counts, so our semi-scientific end result is now only ~1.91 million words.
So what is 1.91 million words?
http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/1869
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is 473k words, making Precipice MCF four times as long. Precipice also just slightly passes ASOIAF, the Game of Thrones books, beating their 1.77m wordcount by roughly 140k words. We also beat the Dark Tower series's 1.25k length by 660k words.
To give a visual, this...
Is somewhere between 530k and 560k (depending on the translation and how much fluff they cut, and I don't know what version this picture is). That would be roughly a little more than a quarter the size of Precipice.
Now, the big difference of course is that MCF precipice is a mess. A lot of it is shit posts, a lot of it is shit writing, and there are plenty of dead end stories and unnecessary fluff. None the same, this should help explain to newcomers why we are coming to this with so much in terms of oddly specific rules and baggage. We are cutting a lot of the canon, so don't worry about having to know much about the old thread. We will tell you what is important.
...and if you are wondering, no, we don't expect anybody to read all that. It would be insane if you tried.