i think the news is fixed. for future reference i had to go into Subs.php and modify the updateSettings function, where there was a line
array('variable' => 'string-255', 'value' => 'string-65534'),
which i changed to
array('variable' => 'string-255', 'value' => 'string-524286'),
approximately 8x larger than the default. i can make it larger if needed in the future. right now we are at 158929 chars