Suggestion: Max length of the new Topic's title

Contributors
1

Hi!

I have a small suggestion to set a characters limit for the title when creating new topic on the forum.

Possible advantages:

  1. I think it would encourage writing more concise and specific titles.
  2. Less work for moderators as they wouldn’t have to ask users to change title of the post with a very descriptive title.
  3. User experience, especially when reading the forum on mobile devices.

Some examples of what I’m talking about:

max-title-length

max-title-length2
max-title-length2748×561 40.5 KB

Anyway, it’s just a quick thought really. I haven’t been thinking about it for too long and I’m just curious what are you thinking about this?

3 Likes
2

100% agreeing with this

1 Like
3

about specificity of titles… a lot of the short titles are just “help me with this challenge”, so I wouldn’t really agree about this change making titltes better

Also the default title for using the Ask for Help button, which can be pretty long, already people are told that their topic title is already in use, being told also to make it shorter would be a worse using experience

1 Like
4

Yeah, I completely agree. By saying more concise and specific I don’t mean to limit length to 5-6 words. My main concern are these 200 characters long paragraphs in the titles of some posts :smiley:

1 Like
5

This would be nice to have. I agree with your advantages being good reasons to implement this, but I also agree with what @ilenia mentioned about many campers taking the lazy-way-out with “Help Pliz” :roll_eyes:

I would be really happy, if someone could think of a way to minimize the annoyance.

I see Discourse does have the settings for title length: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/75a893fd61b76148d6147bc5fb49814d3f9ff7f9/config/site_settings.yml#L705

1 Like
6

Thanks for your feedback @jsdisco, @ilenia, @sitek94, @Sky020.

I agree that having a bit shorter max title length can keep people from trying to put their entire question in the title (which seems to have happened in this case).

I went in and reduced the maximum title length from 255 characters to 160. Please let me know if that feels to constricting.

1 Like
7

Thanks, for that, Quincy. It will be useful to at least trial.

8

Awesome, thank you!

Does 160 resembles golden ratio (1.618) deliberately? :smiley: