In our installation, the "answers" column in "mdl_question_shortanswer" table have proven to be too short to accommodate all answers entered by teachers.

Several teachers at our Moodle site use the cloze questions quite extensively. Some of them have recently hit the limits of storing answers for short answer subquestions. Answers' IDs are now 6-digit numbers at our site, so the varchar(255) "answers" column in "mdl_question_shortanswer" table is not able to hold more than 36 answers (36[ids] * 6[digits] + 35[commas] = 251). And some of the questions have more than 36 answers. These are usually whole sentences including many different variants with partial grades, etc.

I have changed the type of the "answers" column from "varchar(255)" to "text" and everything is working fine now. I would like to propose similar change to go into 1.9.